


Some Killer Queen You Are

by pearlcaddy



Series: Julie the Vampire Slayer [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: (No one will stay dead who isn't dead in the show), 6+1, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Banter is My Love Language so It's Jukebox's Too, Brief Drinking, But also fluff cause I just can't stay serious for long, Depression, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Alex Mercer/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms), Pining, Suggestive Themes, Temporary Major Character Deaths, mild fight scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27029152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearlcaddy/pseuds/pearlcaddy
Summary: “Can I just point out—when I say I’ve been dying to kiss you, I literally had to. So I’d like credit for my commitment.”Six times Luke couldn’t hold Julie’s hand, and one time he could.In 1998, Rose the Vampire Slayer and her Watcher Luke Patterson die saving the world. 17 years later, the ghost of Luke comes back to find that he has a new calling: protecting and mentoring the new Slayer, Rose’s daughter Julie. But it turns out that the only thing harder than being a Watcher is being a ghost Watcher who’s only corporeal to demons and is in love with his Slayer. There really needs to be a quick-start guide for this.Buffyfusion fic, but you don’t need to know anything aboutBuffy. Basically just a vehicle for exploring a different take on Luke as a ghost and the "they can't touch" thing.
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Flynn, Alex Mercer & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters, Alex Mercer & Luke Patterson, Alex Mercer & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters, Julie Molina & Reggie Peters, Julie Molina/Luke Patterson, Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters, Luke Patterson & Rose Molina, Luke Patterson & Willie
Series: Julie the Vampire Slayer [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1977202
Comments: 493
Kudos: 538





	1. This World is Not Made For You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Rollercoaster" by Bleachers  
> Chapter title from "Run Boy Run" by Woodkid
> 
> I blame this entire premise on the scene in the pilot where Julie confronts the guys with a cross. Once I saw that, it was only a matter of time before I made her the Slayer.
> 
> This fic was meant to be a series of vignettes from over the years of Julie as the Slayer, but brevity is not the soul of me so it's going to be a series of very long vignettes.
> 
> Also, there's no Carlos because the timeline won’t allow. I’m so sorry, Carlos. (If you’re familiar with _Buffy_ , he gets the Dawn treatment starting in chapter 7, but I wasn't able to fit that into this story, so you'll only get Carlos if you read other works in the series.)

****

**January 1998**

What is it they say? _Into every generation a Slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number—_

Yeah, Luke’s always thought that was bullshit. 

They mention that she’ll be born; they never mention that she’ll die. That every single one of them will die, decades before their time, brutally and painfully on the frontlines for a humanity who will never know who they were or what they did.

They mention that she’ll have powers beyond any other mortal; they really downplay the fact that the fate of the world is her sole responsibility, which means that ultimately she is always alone… and always on call.

“But Rose, you just gave birth!”

Ray Molina watches with horror as Rose awkwardly maneuvers herself out of her hospital bed and places the bundle that is their newborn daughter in her husband’s arms. He glares at Luke, who stands awkwardly in the doorway with a duffel bag that Luke knows Ray knows is full of weapons.

“Can you not handle it for _one day_ , instead of just Watching on the sideline?” Ray snaps. Ray has always hated the term “Watcher” and he’s spent the entirety of Rose’s seven-month tenure as the Vampire Slayer making snide comments to Luke about his title.

To be fair, Luke agrees. The name is awful, and just emphasizes exactly how awful the role is: the scholar who watches from afar, training the Slayer and researching her foes. Sending her into battles he’s unable to really fight in and just hoping every time that she doesn’t die.

But the reality is that Luke is just a normal human with decidedly mortal arm strength. “If it was just one vampire, then I could, but this isn’t just one vamp.”

Rose ties her hair back and grasps her husband’s face firmly. “This isn’t Luke’s fault, _mi amor_. This is the apocalypse, and if we want Julie to have a world to grow up in, then I need to stop it.”

Ray’s fearful tears mix with the joyful tears that had been running down his face just minutes ago as he celebrated the birth of his daughter. “Promise you’ll come back to me.”

Instead of making a promise she knows she can’t keep, Rose kisses him deeply. Luke quickly steps into the hallway to give them privacy. Of all the practical things the Watchers’ Council failed to train him on, the one he struggles with the most is the awkward proximity he has to the Slayer’s personal life. He didn’t want to inform Rose that she’d been called as the Slayer at her wedding reception, and he didn’t want to barge into her hospital room hours after she’d given birth to announce a surprise apocalypse, but here he is.

The lights around him flicker multiple times and go off. There are no shouts of alarm—it’s one of the things he likes best about Sunnydale, California. While none of its residents actually know that they live on the mouth of hell, they tend to sense when supernatural happenings are afoot. Probably without being able to explain to themselves why, all non-essential doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors have left the hospital. 

Ray hurries out of the room and rushes past Luke without making eye contact. Rose appears in the doorway, her eyes shiny but her chin determined. She’s put on loose pants under her hospital gown. 

“Um, we don’t have a lot of time, but you could probably change your shirt.”

She waddles over to him and starts searching in his bag for her weapons. “I’m hoping the blood will make me look intimidating.” She pulls out her favorite hand axe, whose wooden handle is sharpened into a stake. “What do you think?”

“I mean, he’s a vampire, so he’s probably gonna be more intimidated by the pointy wood than the blood, but still a strong look.”

“You have the Hand of Ortega?”

Luke holds up a small, shining blue ball of light and slaps it on the end of the stake. The wooden handle glows for a moment, then fades to its normal appearance.

“That should cancel out the indestructibility spell and let you get the stake through his heart.” He nods toward the stairwell and they start hurrying down the stairs, Rose walking more gingerly than him.

“So, normal staking?”

“Yeah, just one of your classic post-birth fights with an indestructible vampire. Oh, and…” He pulls a locket out of his pocket. “Protection amulet I got from a warlock at the Bronze. It’s for Julie, but I’m sure she won’t mind you borrowing it.”

Rose shoots him an unimpressed look. “If protection amulets actually worked, the Watchers’ Council would give them to every Slayer. You keep your superstitious crap, _mijo_ ,” she says fondly.

“She fights vampires and demons and the forces of darkness on the daily, but she doesn’t believe in protection amulets.”

“I don’t believe in your ‘warlock at the Bronze.’ That automatic stake you got me nearly stabbed _me_ in the heart.”

“Sorry for trying to lighten the slaying load when you were eight months pregnant.” He holds the amulet out to her. “Come on, what’s the worst thing that can happen?”

“Being stabbed in the heart, raising an army of the undead, summoning a demon who tries to kill everyone with the power of music…?” A hot flush of shame warms him. Yeah, he’s tried a lot of stuff to make Rose’s life easier, and honestly, he’s pretty consistently just made it worse most of the time. She pushes his hand back to him. Still determined to make the most of the (honestly embarrassing amount of money he spent on the) protection amulet, he pulls it over his head anyways and sticks his tongue out at her. She shakes her head, exasperated. “With age comes wisdom. I guarantee in five years, you too will be saying that protection amulets are superstitious crap.”

She stops short with a loud groan, clutching her lower belly and leaning heavily on the banister of the stairwell.

“Are you okay?” he asks. She glares at him and gestures at her hospital gown.

“Honestly, I know maternity leave in this country is short, but this seems a bit extreme.” He bites his lip, not feeling like he’s allowed to laugh. Her eyes dance with mirth as she looks up at him. “Luke, it’s the end of the world. We might as well laugh about it.”

He searches her face for a sign of how she’s actually feeling. Rose is tough and rarely admits when she can’t handle things. Always with the flippant jokes. Case in point—she notices him looking at her, and shrugs. “I said I was looking forward to seeing what slaying was like when I wasn’t pregnant, but I didn’t mean it needed to be immediate.”

Rose’s pregnancy is probably the reason Luke is even a Watcher to begin with. His parents are Watchers—he’s been trained since birth to be a Watcher (“his sacred duty,” they said) and had only just gotten his formal qualification when Rose was called as the Slayer. She was 22, which for a new Slayer is considered geriatric, and pregnant. They’d tasked the green, seventeen-year-old Watcher with an assignment they’d assumed would be short term so they didn’t have to relocate one of their more senior Watchers. Seven months later, Rose has outlived their assumptions, but Luke is all too aware that the Council means for his presence by her side to be an insult to her rather than a compliment to him.

As they reach the end of the staircase at the basement floor, he pulls his stake from the duffel bag and dumps the bag on the ground. A second later, he feels a deep vibration under his feet and hears a loud scream. Rose’s face pales. “They’ve already started.” She reaches for the stairwell door. He slams his hand on the door, holding it shut. She’s stronger than him, could open it easily, but he usually doesn’t disagree with her, so she’s not expecting it.

“We should scope out the situation first—”

“They are trying to open the mouth of hell in the town where my family lives. We don’t have time.” Flinging open the door, she runs into the basement. He has no choice but to follow.

A trio of vampires stands in the middle of the storage area. They’ve flung aside hospital shelves to make space for themselves in the exact center of the room. The concrete floor has been ripped up, revealing an ancient seal. One of the vampires, dressed in a black robe, holds a doctor over the seal with a knife to her throat, about to unleash her blood.

The lead vampire, glowing purple from the effects of his indestructability spell, looks up and grins. Rolling his head casually, his face morphs into his vampire face: bumpy ridges on his forehead, fangs, yellow eyes. “Slayer, I’m glad you got our invitation.”

Rose scoffs at his pathetic line and immediately springs into battle. She sweeps her axe, taking off the head of the vampire holding the doctor, and then jerking the handle back around to drive the stake into the heart of the other vampire. They both immediately crumble to dust. Triumphant, she grins and whirls on the lead vampire.

Luke grabs the doctor and pulls her away from the fighting. The last thing they need is a human’s blood on the seal, opening up the entrance to hell. He shoves her into the stairwell. “Run.”

Then he hears a scream. He spins around to see the lead vampire kick Rose in the lower belly. She crumples to the ground. 

“Rose!”

Then he suddenly feels a grip at the back of his neck and he’s lifted off the floor.

“It’s the baby Watcher,” a voice croons in his ear. Of course there aren’t just three vampires. The vampire sinks her teeth into his shoulder. Luke tries to wriggle free, but he doesn’t have any supernatural powers. He’s just a seventeen-year-old mortal boy. Just a Luke. He feels his stake slip through his fingers and clatter noisily on the ground. His eyes struggle to focus on the fight in front of him, but he’s only in time to see the lead vampire wrench the axe away from Rose and smash the blade into her chest. She shudders and stumbles backwards, blood starting to drip from her mouth.

She stares down at the axe, disbelieving, then wrenches it out of her body.

“You Slayers, you’re all the same,” the vampire grins. “So fragile.”

Rose lifts her eyes to lock with the vampire’s, her face glowing with stubborn, brave power. “Yeah, well, you vampires are all the same.” She spits the blood out of her mouth. “Afraid of a little splinter.”

She slams the stake into his chest. With a surprised scream, he bursts into dust. She spins around, and with the fury and skill of centuries of Slayers, she flings the axe toward Luke, slicing the head off of the vampire holding him. Luke falls forward the instant the body disintegrates.

Their eyes lock across the room. They’ve won. But they also know they’ve lost. Rose stumbles back onto the floor, and Luke collapses. The last thing he sees before everything goes black is her eyes going glassy.

* * *

The best way Luke can think to describe what happens next is that it’s a bit like a night of dreamless sleep. The only things you technically remember are being awake on each end. But a part of you remembers the grey void of sleep in between, knows time has passed even if you don't know exactly how much.

* * *

****

**????**

It feels a bit like trying to wriggle out of a sweater that’s too small for you. But, like, if every single one of your atoms is trying to do that and also like the sweater is made of knives and also like everything’s on fire.

Luke falls to the ground with a scream. His fingers dig into the grass, feeling moist dirt under his fingertips.

Grass? Where’s the concrete of the hospital? He jumps backward, trying to get to his feet, but his whole body feels wriggly. What the hell?

He suddenly becomes aware of the fact that the screaming that he thought was coming from him is still going on. In reality, it seems to be coming from a teenage girl who is currently lying on the grass and trying desperately to crawl away from him. Her necklace is glowing.

“What the hell is going on?” he asks, even though the girl’s screams should really clue him in that she’s not the person around here who has information. “Is this heaven?”

Whatever the girl is expecting him to say, it’s not that. “You… think _this_ is heaven?”

He glances around him. It’s a cemetery at night. A tragically familiar view for a Watcher. “I mean, I would have preferred more of a Glastonbury vibe, but I did spend a lot of my life in graveyards, so this tracks.”

“This isn’t a graveyard, it’s a cemetery.” She replies on autopilot, not really seeming invested in the discussion. Her gaze is technically resting on him but not really focusing on him. “Um, I’m not quite sure how to tell you this, especially because I don’t know what your deal is, but I think there’s a, um, a vampire behind you.”

Luke whips around. Sure enough, there’s a vampire crawling out of a grave about a hundred feet away.

He stumbles back, searching his pockets for his stake. But of course, he dropped it back in the hospital. He starts backing away from the vampire, and the girl scurries to her feet to join his retreat.

“Do you have a pencil?” he asks her quickly.

“A pencil?”

“Yeah, you look like you’re still in school. Don’t you have a pencil?”

“I maybe have a mechanical pencil somewhere, but—”

The vampire seems to have gotten his foot stuck in his coffin, which is at least buying them some time. But not much. 

“No, a wooden pencil.”

“Why would I have a _wooden pencil_?”

“Okay, do you have something that can be used to behead someone?”

“Yeah, I have a machete in my purse.”

“Great, give it here!”

He registers her sarcastic tone when he realizes that she is 1) not handing him a machete (which, rude), and 2) staring at him, bewildered. “Who do you know who carries a machete?”

“Lots of people. Do you have fire?”

“Yeah, I have a torch in my purse.”

Luke exhales loudly. “Dude, I get that this is a super confusing situation, but we can’t actually kill the vampire with sarcasm.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t even have a purse.”

The vampire appears to have finally freed his foot and is digging himself out of the dirt.

The girl takes another step back and a loud crack echoes through the cemetery. She jumps, then looks down at the stick under her foot. “You wanted wood?”

He grabs for her hand, intending to steer her behind him and pick up the stick, but his hand passes right through hers.

She screams and scrambles away from him. “Are… are you a ghost?!”

“… Fuck.”

He tries to pick up the stick, but his fingers go through that too. It feels a little more… not solid, exactly, but instead of his fingers passing through air like her hand, it feels more like they’re passing through water. Probably with practice, he could pick it up, but now is so not the time.

“Who’s supposed to kill the vampire??” Panic takes over her face. He realizes that her flippancy, which he’d taken for shock, has been partially fueled by thinking that he'll be able to take care of the situation. She stares at him, shaking. “What do we do? Do we run?”

Luke glances over at the vampire. He’s finally pulled himself completely free of the grave and is stumbling towards them, eyes full of hunger, picking up speed.

“No, he can outrun us.” Luke turns back to her, suddenly struck by how much she reminds him of Rose when she faced her first vampire. “Look, you can do this. New vampires are strong, but they’re super hungry. They’re not focused, and they don’t have any martial arts skills yet.”

“Yet??”

“Just dodge him, and drive the branch into his heart with all your strength. Right here.” He thumps the middle of his own chest, trying not to notice his lack of a heartbeat. “You can rock this.” Honestly, he’s not entirely sure of that, but regular humans can and do kill vampires. It’s harder, because shoving a piece of wood through an undead rib cage takes arm strength that Luke himself doesn’t always have, but he knows that there’s a lot of power in sheer adrenaline and just fucking believing something might be possible.

“But I’m just a girl.” Her whole body trembles, and he feels a strange, impossible urge to squeeze her hand reassuringly.

“I’m not bullshitting you—more vampires have been slain throughout time by ‘just a girl’s than by literally anyone else. I promise, you got this.”

She is still shaking like a leaf, but she grabs the stick and turns towards the approaching vampire. Sure enough, he lunges at her with a hungry scream of rage. She ducks and tries to slam the stick in his chest, but she stabs too far to the left. Rookie mistake. The vampire flings her to the ground, but she jumps back up, surprisingly resilient. She smashes the heel of her left palm into the vamp’s nose, yanks the stick out of his chest with her right hand, and then slams it back in. This time, it hits home. He bursts into dust.

She stumbles backwards.

“Holy shit.” He stares at her. That was… not normal human strength.

“Okay, what the fuck is going on? I was just trying to visit my mom at, admittedly, an inadvisable time of the night…” She gestures widely toward a nearby grave. He glances at it on auto-pilot, and stops cold. The name is too far away to read, but the top of the headstone is adorned with a large dahlia. Feeling detached from his body, he drifts towards it. “And then suddenly a vampire is crawling out of the ground and then my locket starts glowing and then a ghost appears out of nowhere and now you’re not even listening to me??”

He stares at the name carved on the headstone. Rose Molina.

“What year is it?”

“Um, 2015?”

Seventeen years.

Seventeen years, and his best friend in the ground the whole time. He puts a hand on her headstone and sinks down into a crouch. “I’m so sorry.”

Confused, the girl glances between him and the headstone. “Did you… know my mom? Cause you look… too young to have known my mom.”

A lifetime of grief sits in his throat, desperate to come screaming out, but there is a terrified girl next to him whose entire understanding of the world has just been ripped away and there’s no one in this moment who can help her except for the worst Watcher in the history of Watchers.

“It’s Julie, right?”

She backs away from him, holding the stick in front of her. “How do you know my name?”

“We’ve met. You were, like, a couple hours old at the time, so it’s cool if you don’t remember me.”

“Could you say something that isn’t terrifying, and instead actually answers some questions?”

“Probably not. Your life is about to get… super weird.” She lowers the stick as he stands up. At least honesty seems to have won him a little trust. “Do you know what the Vampire Slayer is?”

“I read Anita Blake—"

“Not vampire hunter, Vampire Slayer.”

“No, why?”

He sighs heavily. “Because you are one. The one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episodes of _Buffy_ referenced in this chapter:  
> • “Dead Man's Party”  
> • “Once More With Feeling”  
> • “Lessons”  
> • “Becoming”


	2. What It Cost I Ain't Ever Getting Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "You’re Still a Mystery" by Bleachers  
> (A lot of titles in this are going to be from Bleachers, and I'm unapologetic about that.)
> 
> This fic follows in the footsteps of the grand tradition of Reggie as Julie’s stepbrother, but Reggie and Julie were five years old when Ray and Reggie’s mom got married, so they were raised as siblings and they’ll only ever refer to each other as brother/sister.

**August 2015**

“But why not?” Defiant, Julie crosses her arms over her chest.

“Because you’re untrained, and it’s dangerous,” Luke insists.

“I’m untrained because you won’t train me!”

“Because I’m not your Watcher.”

“But _why_ aren’t you my Watcher?”

“Because I’m dead, and therefore retired.” Luke gestures around the loft of the abandoned warehouse they’re standing in to emphasize his point. He has no money, and no actual need to sleep, so this is where he’s been living. Because he’s dead. And therefore retired.

“You’re not properly dead.”

“Dude, I was a shit Watcher. Believe me, me training you will make things worse.” Julie opens her mouth to argue, but Luke cuts her off. “Okay, prime example, your identity as the Vampire Slayer is supposed to be secret, okay? That’s, like, the number one thing. People can’t know about your secret identity. What do you call this?”

He gestures to Alex and Flynn, who watch their discussion like a game of ping pong.

Unashamed, Julie holds her head high. “People knowing about my secret identity. BUT that’s not your fault. _I_ told my best friends. I can’t tell my dad that I want to fight vampires because he’d freak out, so I needed to talk to someone about how I have a destiny and how my Watcher is a cute ghost.”

For a second, Luke’s reminded that he’s seventeen and a pretty girl is calling him cute. But he’s a dead seventeen and, while he isn’t technically her Watcher, it’s been a week since she was called and the Council hasn’t sent her an official Watcher yet, so he lets the cute comment sail by. “I’m not your Watcher.”

“I really thought you’d focus on the cute thing.”

“Molina.”

“He’s my brother, okay? Vampires kidnapped Reggie, and as the Vampire _Slayer_ , I’m not going to leave him there.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’ll scope it out-”

Flynn snorts loudly, finally interrupting. “No offense, but what are you contributing to the war effort? Decorative pecs? At least I can throw a punch.”

“Neither of you,” Luke points at Flynn and Alex, “should be going anywhere. Molina at least has supernatural strength, agility, and healing. You’re mortal. You have no idea how fragile you are.”

“I’m not fragile.” Alex flexes. “Just last week, I did a single push up.”

“Proves my point, dude. None of you are taking this seriously.”

“Come on.” Flynn rolls her eyes. “We just found out that vampires exist. It’s either curl up in our beds forever and cry, or be sarcastic.”

“I plan to do both.” Alex rests his elbow on Flynn’s shoulder.

Desperate, Luke spins back to Julie. “Look, I know some demons in Sunnydale who are decent dudes. I can scout things out, and they’ll be the muscle, okay? But I’m not leading you guys into battle.”

“You’re not leading us. We’re choosing to go into battle, and you’re hanging back and yelling out helpful hints.”

Alex pipes up. “Julie, maybe not your strongest argument?”

Julie scrunches up her curls in frustration. “Well, what do you suggest?”

Flynn rubs her friend’s shoulder with a soothing hand, then meets Luke's gaze, steely-eyed. “We’re going for Reggie whether you help us or not.”

Luke groans loudly. He doesn’t know how to argue with them. In their shoes, he would be saying and doing the same things. Hell, he’d already be at the vampires’ nest. But he knows what they still don’t—the very real human cost of fighting the forces of darkness.

It’s partly his fault—he’s been avoiding bringing it up. Julie told him that her mother died in childbirth, so Ray’s obviously never told Julie the truth about Rose or vampires. How can Luke tell her why he doesn’t want her in battle without opening up some painful wounds about her mother’s death, her father’s lies, and her own fate? She hasn’t yet seemed to grasp the “all Slayers die young and die painfully” element of her destiny, and he hasn’t had the heart to push it beyond making vague comments about her safety. Why does he have to tell yet another Molina woman that she’s due to die prematurely for the sake of the universe?

But maybe this is an opening for him to stress the whole “you may die horribly” thing without sending Julie into an existential crisis.

“Do you wanna know how I died?” He pulls out the neck of his muscle tee to reveal the bite scars on his shoulder. All three of the humans’ eyes widen. “I spent my whole life studying vampires and training to fight. It took one hungry vamp about twenty seconds to drain all the blood out of me.”

“That’s so cool!” Flynn’s eyes widen for a moment. Then her face quickly turns apologetic. “Sorry, not cool. Tragic.”

Julie steps closer to him. “Look, maybe we’re being a bit… immature?” She glances at Alex and Flynn.

Alex nods. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

Expression unusually serious, she turns back to Luke. “I promise we get that it’s dangerous. But you can’t say ‘I know you can rock this’”—she imitates him in a way that feels both unnecessary and spot on—“and then put me in bubble wrap. And you can’t tell me I’m the Vampire Slayer _and_ tell me I can’t slay vampires.” She has a point, and he knows it. But that’s not why he relents. It’s because of what she says next, as she pleads with wide, vulnerable eyes. “Do you not believe I can do this?”

“Of course I do.” Fuck. There’s no other choice. “If you want to save Reggie, we have to go now.” Flynn and Alex cheer, but the vulnerable look doesn’t fully leave Julie’s face. “Alex, you were closest to Reggie when they took him. Where do you think they were heading?”

* * *

The plan is for Luke to use his ghost abilities to poof in to the sewers where they suspect the vampires' nest is. If the vampires see Luke, he reasons, the worst that can happen is that they try to punch thin air.

Unfortunately, he’s the one who ends up getting the surprise when he poofs into the sewers right next to a vampire. He grins cheekily and waves—hey, might as well enjoy this whole ghost thing, right?

Nope. The vampire swings a fist at his face and it makes contact with a sharp crack. Luke staggers back, more shocked than hurt, and poofs out.

He reappears beside Julie on the sidewalk by the sewer entrance in the industrial part of Sunnydale.

“What happ-Are you bleeding?”

“Okay, some news. Turns out that I’m not noncorporeal.”

Flynn immediately tries to squeeze his bicep, but her hand goes through him. Julie smacks her friend lightly on the arm. “I was just checking!” Flynn cries, unapologetic. When Julie turns away, Alex gives Flynn a fist bump down low. 

Julie pointedly ignores her friends. “Okay, so, what? Vampires can touch you?”

Luke squeezes his nose bridge and winces. “Lemme check real quick.”

He poofs away and then back twenty seconds later, his face covered in multiple bruises and an unruly amount of pain.

“Where did you go?” Julie asks.

“Willie’s Place. Demon bar in the city. I was wondering if other demons can touch me. Turns out they can. Also they don’t like it when people suddenly appear out of nowhere.”

“That shocks me,” Julie deadpans. “Truly.” He grins sheepishly at her. An answering grin slides across her face, like she's won some sort of prize. “Look at that—he smiles.”

Okay, yeah. She’s cute.

He pulls his attention back to the problem at hand. “Okay, so I can touch demons. That means I’m back in play.” He grins at Flynn. “Not just decorative anymore.”

“About time you pulled your weight around here."

Julie grins. “You ready for take two?”

* * *

Luke assumes that there is a way to utilize poofing in and out effectively in a fight, using it to confuse and surprise the enemy. But he’s only been a ghost for a week, and so far the poofing in and out is more confusing and surprising for him than anyone else. Every time he arrives in a new place, he needs to take several seconds to get his bearings. It doesn’t help that Julie, Alex, and Flynn are moving ahead in the tunnels. Every time he tries to poof back to let them know what’s up ahead, he ends up missing, either too far forward or too far back. After six tries, he stop trying and just walks with them, his head spinning.

“Okay, so,” Julie asks. “Wood through the heart, beheading, fire, sunlight? Anything else slay vamps?” She says “vamps” like she’s trying out new slang she’s not sure about, and he can’t help but grin. 

“Um, holy water, but you need a lot of it to actually slay. Not super practical. Religious symbols don’t kill vamps, but they burn, so they’re a good deterrent for a moment if you don’t have anything else and just need to get away. Though I did meet a vamp once who, uh, liked the burn, so that’s not 100%.”

“Liked the burn?” She looks confused for a second, then her eyes bug. “Oh, like a… sex thing?”

“Really didn’t ask questions, more focused on running for my life.”

“Okay, ew. Um… no reflection, flying, hate garlic, can’t come in unless invited?”

“Yes, no, no, yes.” She shoots him an exasperated look. “They can’t fly, and garlic won’t do anything. Though my Slayer once chased a vamp out of a Trader Joe’s by chucking garlic cloves at him like they were hand grenades, so, you know. If you throw hard enough and believe in yourself.”

“You had another Slayer?”

The vampire who steps out into the hallway has perfect timing. Julie ducks her punch and slams her stick into the vampire’s chest. She disappears into dust.

“The dust thing is cool,” Alex observes. “It’s like they’re self-cleaning.”

Flynn raises a dubious eyebrow. “… except for the dust.”

“I mean, unless Julie’s planning on slaying in her living room, I don’t think the dust is really going to matter.”

“What’s up there?” Julie points to a door at the end of the hallway. Luke poofs in and out.

“Teenage boy, black hair, red flannel?”

“Reggie!” the three humans exclaim and sprint toward the door.

Julie breaks the doorknob clean off with a simple twist of her wrist and they hurry in. Reggie is sprawled on the floor in the corner, pale. Julie collapses at his side, shaking him awake. “Reggie, Reggie!”

His eyes blink open slowly, and a groggy voice groans out of him. “Jules?”

“Well, that was easy,” Alex sighs with relief.

“Yeah, you really oversold how hard this would be.” But Flynn looks skeptical.

She has a point—it _was_ way too easy. Everything about this screams “trap.” And it’s only then that Luke notices a bite on Reggie’s neck, just barely hidden by the collar of his flannel. And, more importantly, the tint of blood at his lips.

“Julie, get away from him.”

“What? Why?”

Reggie lunges for her. Not about to force Julie to use her Slayer powers against her own brother, Luke grabs him by the shoulders and slams him into the wall.

“They turned him. He’s a vampire.”

* * *

Luke manages to hold Reggie at bay until the three humans escape, though he has a new selection of bruises and has learned that apparently his blood (or whatever it is that flows through his ghost body) is “totally undrinkable, dude.”

The four of them take refuge in Luke’s warehouse. He rummages up some blankets to drape around the humans’ shoulders, trying to help alleviate the effects of shock. The three teenagers huddle together on the floor. Alex and Flynn can’t stop crying, but Julie just stares vacantly in disbelief, like she can singlehandedly undo her brother’s murder by simply not believing it’s happened.

Luke takes a deep breath as he sits across from them. He hates to say this right now, but this is the kind of thing a Watcher needs to do. “You know how the vampire turning thing works?”

“They suck your blood, you suck their blood.” Julie’s voice sounds distant, the way it did in the cemetery the day they met.

“After that. You know…” God, this is the last thing they need to hear right now, but he has to be sure that they know. People get killed for thinking a vampire is the same person they used to be. “Reggie’s soul is gone. He’s not in there anymore. The thing in his body is now a-”

“Demon, yeah," Flynn cuts him off. "We got it when you could touch him, thanks.”

“I’m sorry. But vampires are a mindfuck, and we have to be on the same page.” His eyes meet Julie’s again. “I’m so, so sorry.”

He wishes he could give her a hug, but the closest he can get is putting his foot next to hers and pretending that he can nudge it if he wants to. They sit in silence for a while. Eventually, the deep, steady breaths on either side of her let him know that her friends have fallen asleep.

But Julie fiddles with the protection amulet around her neck, dragging the locket back and forth on the chain. She clears her throat and meets his gaze. Then starts listing facts, as if laying out the pieces to a puzzle she’s trying to solve.

“You knew my mother.” Dread pools in his stomach. “She died the day I was born. So did you. You were killed by a vampire. You came out of this necklace. Which I found in a box of my mom’s old stuff. You’ve worked with a Slayer before.” Of course she put it together. “My mother didn’t die in childbirth, did she?”

What’s he going to do? Lie to her when she semi-trusts him? Deny Rose her legacy of bravery just like the rest of the world?

“No, she died saving the world.”

Julie bursts into tears. Again, he desperately wants to hug her, to comfort her. But all he can do is watch her cry. (And god, people crying still makes him uncomfortable, even after seventeen years of being dead.)

It takes several minutes for her breathing to calm down. “Why didn’t you tell me when we first met?”

Trying to figure out how to put his thoughts into words, he sighs. “When you’re called as the Slayer, it’s all excitement and superpowers and grand destiny. No one really wants to talk about the price you pay for it.”

“I knew this was dangerous.”

Shaking his head, he leans forward. “Every Slayer ‘knows,’ but they don’t _really_ know. Slayers don’t run in families or friend groups. One girl in all the world, randomly chosen from around the globe. They never actually know each other. They know they come from this line of hundreds of other girls for thousands of years who lived short, violent lives. But it’s abstract—it’s faceless girls and it’s so much pain and death that it’s impossible to think about concretely. And they’ve got all this supernatural strength and power and it’s easy to feel like they’re invincible and they’re gonna be the exception. That’s not gonna be the case for you. You’ll _know_ in a way no Slayer has ever known before. I just wanted you to get to feel like a superhero for a bit before…” He can’t finish the sentence.

Julie processes everything he’s said, but sticks on one thing. “How short? How long… do girls live after they’ve been called?”

“It varies. Depending on what forces they have to face, how well they’re trained, what kind of support group they have-” He gestures at the sleeping Alex and Flynn, and only then realizes that Flynn’s eyes are open and she’s been listening the whole time, fresh tears streaming down her face. Luke’s heart sinks.

“But on average?” Julie asks.

“The Watchers’ Council doesn’t keep that kinda data.”

But Julie won’t be bullshitted. “I don’t believe that.”

He tries again. “I dunno the exact number off the top of my head.”

“I don’t believe that either.”

How on earth does she read him so well? “It’s not gonna be helpful for you to know.”

“Fuck.” She leans back against the crate behind her. “So it’s shorter than I think it is.” Again, he’s stuck watching her take in that information, wondering what she’ll do with it. So far, her mind never goes where he expects it to.

“Why don’t you want to be my Watcher?”

Because he remembers being Rose’s Watcher like it was just two weeks ago because, well, for him it was. Even though he’d known the statistics and he’d known the reality, there had been something about actually knowing the Slayer that had made it feel impossible that she could die. Rose had been vibrant and fierce and powerful and unapologetic, and every day that she survived seemed like evidence that she always would. He won’t have that hope this time. Or he shouldn’t. But looking at Julie, even tiny and wrapped in a blanket and grief as she is right now, he can’t imagine her dying. It’ll be the same thing all over again, and does he honestly think he can put himself through that again?

But her eyes meet his and he knows that he doesn’t really have a choice. He was there when she was called. He got her to pick up a stake before she knew it was her destiny to do so. She’s his Slayer, no matter what he’s afraid of.

But he also knows the Council and he knows that the choice won’t be up to him. “I do want to be your Watcher. But they’ll never let me.”

She cocks her head. “Why not?”

* * *

“First of all because he’s far too young.” Quentin Travers, the head of the Watchers’ Council, sits across from Julie. He sweeps his eyes disdainfully around Luke's warehouse loft. Luke isn’t sure if the seventeen years of being dead have given him more perspective on Travers, but the man definitely sounds even more condescending (and somehow more cartoonishly English?) than he had when Luke was alive.

“But he was old enough for my mother?”

“Circumstances were… different.”

Luke snorts loudly. The part of him that wants Travers to suffer for the way he treated Rose longs to force him to explain why it’s different. The part of him that cares about Julie doesn’t want her to know how little her mother’s life mattered to the Council.

“Second of all, he is dead. His abnormal presentation of the afterlife leaves us unable to ascertain his true nature, and we cannot risk tasking your safety to an unknown supernatural entity.” Oh god, there are already Watchers writing impossibly dense doctoral theses about his “abnormal presentation of the afterlife,” aren’t there?

“So… what? He’s not like other ghosts and you’re worried he might be evil?” Julie turns to Luke. The gesture warms the place where his heart should be—she’s already acting like they’re a team. “Is that a valid concern?”

“I don’t _feel_ evil, but I guess you have to take my word for it.”

“I don’t think I could take you seriously as an evil force. You’re allergic to sleeves and you remind me too much of a puppy.”

“What breed of-"

“Third of all,” Travers cuts in loudly, “and most importantly, Mr. Patterson has been operating in an unofficial capacity as your Watcher for less than two weeks, and already your identity as the Slayer has been revealed to two civilians who, as I understand it, then _accompanied you_ into the field. I also understand that a family member was turned several days ago and, in spite of having numerous encounters with him since then and multiple opportunities to slay him, you have not instructed your Slayer to do so.”

Julie stills, her face a war between rage and grief. Every time they’ve run into Reggie over the past few days, Luke has held him off so that Julie can escape, and he stands by that decision. “Yeah, I thought it’d be rad if we let her mourn her brother’s death for at least a week before we asked her to murder him.”

“And how many other people’s families will have to suffer for your coddling? Sentimental and sloppy, Mr. Patterson. I’m recommending you be replaced, effective immediately, by Mrs. Harrison. Miss Molina, you will benefit greatly from her tutelage, she’s-"

“No.” Travers jerks back as if the word is a personal affront. But there’s a look on Julie’s face, the same look she had when she figured out that her mother was a Slayer. Like she’s figured out a truth that the man across from her can’t hide anymore. “Patterson is my Watcher.”

“I’m afraid that you do not get a choice in the matter. The Council is best positioned to make these kinds of decisions. You will welcome Mrs. Harrison as your new Watcher.”

Julie raises an eyebrow, and she looks so like Rose in that moment that it breaks Luke’s heart. “Or what?”

“Pardon me?”

“What are you gonna do if I don’t?”

“… it’s the Council’s orders.”

“So, nothing then.”

He rises to his feet. “Miss Molina-”

She gets up too, meeting him. “I’m the Slayer.” She spits it out with such force that Travers takes a tiny step back. “And he’s my Watcher.”

“That Watcher got your mother killed.” It’s an absolute gut punch. There’s meant to be a code of honor on the Council—unless a Watcher bears very clear responsibility for a Slayer’s death, no other Watcher ever dredges it up. Everyone’s Slayer dies, no matter how good the Watcher. Throwing it in someone’s face, even if every fibre of Luke’s being privately agrees with Travers, is just tacky.

But Julie doesn’t bat an eye. “No, a Council that put the fate of the world on the shoulders of one woman right after she gave birth got my mother killed. And the only person at her side in that battle was that Watcher.” Sneering, she looks Travers up and down. “Where the hell were you?”

Luke feels like his face may literally be glowing with an awestruck smile. He’s never seen anyone so much as disagree with Travers, let alone dress him down so thoroughly. The fact that that dressing down is coming from a tiny teenage girl just adds to his joy.

“If you want an active Slayer, he’s my Watcher. Those are my terms.” Luke can tell from Travers’ resigned eyebrow raise that he knows he has no choice but to cave, so Luke jumps in.

“Actually, two more things: she wants a salary, and she wants an Orb of Thesulah.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Julie’s confusion, but he doesn’t want to explain yet in case his plan doesn’t work.

Travers sighs impatiently. “Only Watchers receive a salary-”

Julie’s mouth drops open. “Excuse me? _Watchers_ are paid but Slayers aren’t?”

“Miss Molina, you have a sacred destiny-”

“Yes, my destiny is to receive payment for my labor.” Luke can feel that glowing smile return to his face. This girl is his actual hero.

Travers exhales again. “We could possibly negotiate… a stipend-”

“Salary or slay your own damn vamps.”

Travers glares at Luke, who just smiles innocently back. He only regrets that he didn’t realize the Slayer had this kind of bargaining power back when he was first assigned to Rose.

“Fine, a salary.” He turns his attention back to Luke, a knowing look on his face. “But there are no more Orbs of Thesulah in this world.”

Hundreds of underground vaults in the Council Chambers storing artifacts of the occult, and not a single Orb of Thesulah? Luke takes a page out of Julie’s book. “I don’t believe you.”

“Mr. Patterson-" This is when Luke loses his patience.

“You owe her this. I asked you to send backup to that hospital. The Special Ops team, anything.”

“That was seventeen years ago.”

“For you. Two weeks for me, a lifetime for her.” He can guess the mental math the Council did—they didn’t like Slayers to be mothers, especially new mothers. Too much focus on a life outside slaying. Calculations had been made, and Rose had been left on her own. They may not have killed her directly, but they might as well have. “The Orb. Bare minimum you owe her.”

“Even if we had one, none in the Council’s employ will cast that spell.” Julie opens her mouth to argue, but Travers holds up a firm hand. “That’s not something you can bully your way into. We’re not risking the souls of our witches on that ritual.”

“We don’t need the Council’s witches. Just the Orb.”

Julie still doesn’t know what’s going on, but she crosses her arms and tries to look intimidating to force the point. Luke struggles to keep a grin off his face at her stern expression.

Travers sighs heavily, and sticks out his hand for Julie to shake. “Mr. Patterson as your Watcher, a… salary, and an Orb of Thesulah. I do hope the rest of our communications won’t be this hostile.”

Based on Travers’ wince, Luke assumes that Julie is shaking his hand with a bit of her Slayer strength. She forces an ugly smile at him. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

* * *

Julie is curled up on her bed, apparently trying and failing to sleep when Luke appears in her room. Jerking backwards, she lets out a soft shriek.

“Don’t you knock??”

“Um…”

“Boundaries! Doors exist.”

He chuckles sheepishly. “Right, sorry, forgot about those.”

But she slips out of bed and approaches him. “Are there vampires or something?”

He shakes his head and rests his hand on her desk as he roots in his pocket for something. Pushing all his focus to his fingers, he holds up a small black box and holds it out for her to take.

“What’s this?”

“The only Orb of Thesulah left in the world. According to the Council.”

“Are you finally going to tell me what that is?”

“Ingredient in the Ritual of Restoration-"

“Patterson, I’m really not in the mood for mystical nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense; it’s very real.”

“That doesn’t make it not nonsense.”

He can’t help but laugh. Her impatient disdain for all the pomp and circumstance of slaying, magic, and demonology may be the best thing that’s happened to him since he died. “The Orb of Thesulah retrieves a human soul. The Ritual of Restoration puts that soul back in the body it belongs to.”

Brows furrowed, she tries to connect the pieces. He can see when it clicks because her jaw drops, no words coming out for a moment as she looks to him for confirmation. “Reggie?”

“He’ll still be a vampire. But he will be Reggie.”

Her fingers trace the box gently, tears filling her eyes. “How do we…” She opens the box, finding it empty.

“Already done. I know a warlock at the Bronze. He finished the Ritual five minutes ago.” For the price of basically Luke’s entire yearly salary, but hey, benefit of being a ghost. What else is he going to do with money? “Your brother should be home soon.”

Disbelief and joy take over her face, and she stares at him like... he doesn't know. No one's ever looked at him like that before. “I really want to hug you right now.”

“Well, don’t, cause you’ll fall on your face.” 

She sets her hand next to his on the desk, fitting her fingers in the gaps between his. She's not smiling exactly, but beaming with a fierce internal light. “Thank you,” she whispers fervently.

“You’re welcome.”

He’s suddenly conscious of the silence in the room, their proximity, the lateness of the hour. It feels private and tense, overwhelmingly intimate, and he’s acutely aware of the fact that he died before he got to spend too much time in other people’s bedrooms.

From downstairs, they hear a knock on the door. It breaks the tension. Her head spins wildly from him to the direction of the front door, as if she can see through the floorboards. He gives her a soft smile.

“Go invite your brother in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episodes of _Buffy_ referenced in this chapter:  
> • “Helpless” (one of my favorites, so I had to give some nod to it)  
> • “Welcome to the Hellmouth”/”The Harvest”  
> • “Becoming”  
> • Not a direct reference, but the Travers scene was very inspired by “Checkpoint,” which is another of my favorite episodes  
> 


	3. Take Me Back To A Time When I Loved And I Meant It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Girl" by Jukebox the Ghost (because it's me and I'm not writing a Jukebox fic without Jukebox the Ghost)

****

**February 2016**

When the buzzer in his apartment goes off on a Monday night, Luke is confused. Not just Luke.

“Do you have friends who aren't us?” Reggie gapes at him in shock.

“Reggie, rude.” Alex chastises him. Then grins. “You know he has two whole other friends.”

Luke wants to roll his eyes at them but they’re not wrong. Six months into this afterlife thing, his social circle is still limited to four people, and two of them are already in his apartment. He and Flynn haven’t really reached the “drop by uninvited” stage of friendship, so he assumes the person on the other side of the buzzer is Julie. But that doesn’t make sense either, because he and Julie don’t hang out unless it’s Slayer business, and it’s a Monday. Julie has been adamant about taking every Monday off from her nightly patrols for vampires to spend with her dad.

He taps his intercom button. “Hello?”

“Patterson, can I come up?” The speaker is crackly, but behind the horrible sound quality, it sounds like she’s about to cry. Reggie and Alex, who sit at Luke’s dining room table, exchange a worried glance.

“Yeah, of course.” He buzzes her up, then shoots a quizzical look at Reggie.

“She and Dad were supposed to go bowling tonight. That’s all I know.”

There’s a knock on the door and Luke opens it to reveal the trembling eighteen-year-old Slayer. She gives him a quivering smile, which stills when she notices Alex and Reggie. “I didn’t know you guys hung out.”

“We’re friends. Friends hang out.” She raises a pointed eyebrow at that. Luke _doesn’t_ hang out with Julie, and he’s pretty sure she knows that isn’t an accident.

“I guess I assumed you spent all your free time just sitting in your apartment in silence.”

In spite of the tension of the situation, Alex and Reggie burst out laughing.

“Oh,” Alex clarifies. “He used to. It was too sad. We had to intervene.”

Luke gives her an encouraging smile. “See, Mom, I made friends at school.“ He nudges his shoulder towards her—if he were corporeal, he would have made contact with her shoulder in a playful nudge, but over the past few months, he’s gotten really good at avoiding getting too close to Julie, because going through her is just a painful reminder that he’s dead.

Julie slips into his apartment, stopping short when she realizes what’s on the table. “Magic: The Gathering?”

“Every Monday!” Reggie grins.

Luke tenses, waiting for the teasing to start. But she smacks Reggie gently on the arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?? Four of us, we could have done two-headed giant!”

“You play Magic?” Luke asks.

“Who do you think taught Reggie? Ooh!” She whirls around to face Luke, almost running through him. He stops short, very aware of their proximity. But she doesn’t move away. “I bet I can guess what colors you play.”

Shaking his head playfully, he crosses his arms across his chest. “I bet you can’t.”

“Alex has gotta be white-green.”

Luke tries not to let his face react, trying desperately to remain mysterious. “Why?”

“Because white-green is basically the Hufflepuff of Magic. It’s, ‘please don’t hurt me, why can’t we all just be friends?, I’m going to hide behind this giant dinosaur.’”

Alex nods. “It’s true, this game stresses me out.”

“Cheating cause I already know, but Reggie does any combo of green, blue, and red. But he never uses black, and he rarely does white, because he hates playing around with his life total.”

“I’m not a god, I wasn’t meant to have that kind of power.”

Alex shoots a finger gun at Reggie. “You mean you’re not a planeswalker.”

Her brother shakes his head. “Alex, you haven’t been playing long enough to make those kind of references."

“That’s fair.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just, know your place.”

“And what about me?” Luke draws Julie’s attention back to him.

“Red, obviously." She studies him for a moment. "I feel like you dabble in red-blue, maybe even red-white, but your heart belongs to red-black.”

“Why red-black?”

“Because you’re impulsive, relentless, ambitious, and passionate.”

What a rudely accurate summary of him. And yet: “I don’t act impulsive.”

“That’s the tragedy of you as a Watcher, don’t you see? You have to be level-headed and patient, when really you just want to burn down everything that stands in your way as quickly as you can.”

In moments like these, Luke wonders what life would have been if he hadn’t died. No one back in the 90s ever made him feel quite as seen as Julie does. Would he have spent his entire life known as the precocious, level-headed, patient Watcher? Would anyone ever have looked him in the eye and seen the fire and drive within?

He smiles, and concedes. “I’m red-black.” He lets her do a tiny victory dance before he asks, “Do you wanna talk about it, or do you want a distraction?”

Julie groans loudly, but she turns to her brother. “Dad knows about me.”

Reggie’s jaw drops. “What?”

“A vamp attacked us in the parking lot and… he of all people knows what it looks like when a Slayer fights a vampire.”

Luke reaches out to put his hand on her shoulder, but pulls back at the last second. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say?”

Hugging herself, Julie goes silent for a moment. “That I’m not allowed to be the Slayer.”

“Why haven’t we tried that?” Reggie asks sarcastically. “No more destiny for you, Julie. You’re forbidden.”

“Apparently I’m grounded for having ‘stopped an apocalypse without his permission.’ Which is so hypocritical because you failed a math test last week and you just got a talking to!”

“Benefits of being undead. They really don’t expect much from me anymore.” Reggie keeps his tone light, but Luke knows, from the gallows humor and the occasional heartfelt comment that Reggie lets slip, how bitter he is about being a vampire. The Molina family may have welcomed the ensouled vampire back with open arms, filling the house with blackout curtains and enrolling him in an online high school, but none of that returned Reggie’s life to what it was.

“Ray had the same reaction to Rose,” Luke admits.

Julie’s head whips around to him. He’s slowly started talking about Rose more as the months between her death (in his mind) and the present grow, but it’s still tremendously painful, and he knows that he talks about her mother less than she wants him to.

“He… grounded her?”

“Obviously no, but there was a lot of ‘relationships are supposed to be about compromise, why don’t I get a say in this?’ More aimed at the universe than at her. He’ll come around eventually. He knows… that he doesn’t really get a say.”

Julie gestures wildly. “I can’t wait for that! Caleb is planning something, and I can’t be locked in my bedroom when the Big Bad makes his move.”

“Does he know about Luke?” Reggie asks.

“No, I thought ‘also my Watcher is my dead mom’s old Watcher’ might be piling on. I was… thinking that maybe I could stay here with you for a bit?” she asks Luke, shy. “I’d go to Flynn or Alex, but those are the first places he’ll look.”

On a delay, he nods. “Of course. Whatever you need.” 

“And in the meantime, Mom and I will try to talk to him.” Reggie smiles encouragingly at his sister.

She hugs him, resting her chin on the top of his head. “Thanks, Reg.”

“Of course, Little Dude.”

“Three months younger.”

“Still counts, now and always. Now, who wants to play Magic?”

* * *

Four hours later, after Julie has handed all of them their asses on the tabletop battlefield, she sits on Luke’s bed, curled up on herself under his blanket. It’s an image that sticks with him in a way he doesn’t really understand. It’s not like he’s terribly attached to his bed, or even spends that much time in it. He doesn’t sleep, but he enjoys the comfort and normalcy of being able to lie down and think sometimes, and there are times, like now, when it comes in handy. But it’s never felt like an intimate place to him before, so it shouldn’t feel intimate now that she’s in it.

As he hands her a pile of towels, Julie takes them with one hand, continuing to play with the chain of her necklace with the other. She takes in the bookshelves stuffed with old tomes and leather journals, and her eyes linger questioningly on the guitar in the corner.

“You know that protection amulet’s a piece of crap, right?” Luke asks. “I was literally wearing it when I died."

"You’re still here. And it brought me to you.” The softness with which she says it makes him feel warm in his chest. “Maybe protection amulets work in mysterious ways.”

She pats the bed next to her. He hesitates but... he’s a ghost—does it matter where in the room he is? Trying not to betray his nervousness, he sits gingerly on the edge of the mattress and makes eye contact with her. She’s holding his gaze, contemplative. “What?”

“Do you ever think about your unfinished business?”

“What do you mean?”

“At some point you’ll want to move on, right? So you’ll need to complete your unfinished business. Do you know what it is?”

He pauses, mind whirring. “Joining a band.” She snorts. “My parents wanted me to be a Watcher. I had a different plan for my life. I was gonna headline around the globe as Dingoes Ate My Baby.”

“Dingoes Ate My Baby?”

“Hey, it was a topical reference at the time.” Off her look: “Okay, it wasn’t.”

She scrutinizes him. “Rock band?” He nods. “Actually I can picture it. The sleeveless shirts make a little more sense in that context.”

“How’s that?”

“Thirst trap to get a following.”

“What’s a thirst trap?”

She laughs and shoots him a look he can’t decipher. A look he likes even if he doesn't understand it. “Live in the world a little, Patterson.”

“Thanks for reminding me of my painful death, Molina.”

Grinning, she shakes her head. He can never quite get a read on her reaction whenever he makes jokes about his death. His death itself, she can handle. She’s never known him alive. But his death is linked to her mother’s death, and he’s never had the courage, nor have they ever been close enough, to ask her if she’s able to separate them.

“Okay, so, you’ll join a band. Do I get tickets to the gig?”

“You’re not allowed anywhere near my gigs.”

“You can’t stop me, Patterson. I’m imbued with the preternatural strength of an unbroken lineage of the guardians of humanity. I can definitely take out a bouncer.”

“Oh, I’m not gonna perform while you’re alive.”

“Thank you for reminding me of my inevitable untimely death, Patterson.”

“As the ancient prophecy states, karma’s a bitch, dude.”

They’ve moved closer in their banter and he’s aware that, if he weren’t a ghost, he would be able to feel the heat of her body. 

She shakes her head again, then seems to fall into thought. Which he really doesn’t want her to do on this particular topic. He’s pretty sure that his unfinished business is actually to save the Slayer. And the reality is that he never will. He won’t be able to save Julie, and then after Julie, another Slayer will rise, and she will get a painfully short life before being brutally murdered by the forces of darkness, and then another Slayer will rise and on and on. And throughout it all will be Luke, unable to change or help or move on. It’s a miserable enough thing to bear himself—he’ll never put it on her.

“What about you? Before being called, did you know what you wanted to do with your life?”

Suddenly shy, she tucks a curl behind her ear. “Singer-songwriter, actually.” 

“What? How did I not know you could sing?”

“Everyone can sing, Patterson, don’t be elitist.”

“Okay, how did I not know you had a killer voice?”

“Because I can’t slay demons with a high C, so you never asked.”

It’s a direct hit, and it’s fair. He’s always tried to keep them focused on slaying stuff, holding her at a distance, so it’s somehow managed to escape his notice until tonight that she’s a passionate geek and apparently a singer. If she asks him to guess what Magic colors she tends to play, he’ll probably guess wrong. Six months of hiding himself from her, and he knows almost nothing about his Slayer.

“I’m sorry.” There’s a lot behind that sorry, a lot that he doesn’t know how to articulate in a way that won’t remind her of the reality of her destiny.

But she knows. “I get it, but—“

“It’s still not fair.”

“You’re the person who’s going to be there the most for the rest of my life.” He tries to ignore how borderline romantic the sentiment is. “It would be nice if you knew me, that’s all. If we could be friends.”

“We _are_ friends.” She raises an unimpressed eyebrow. “Okay. Friends?”

He sticks out his hand. She reaches out to take it, but her hand falls through his. Her eyes shoot to his, apologetic. “I’m sorr—” A smirk spreads across his face. “You did that on purpose? You always say it’s rude when I do that to you!”

“It _is_ rude when you do it to me. It’s funny when I do it to you.”

“I regret ever asking you to be my Watcher.”

“Oh, you didn’t ask, you begged. You’re stuck with me.”

“Good.” She grins at him. It’s pretty damn infectious, and he's overwhelmed by a strange impulse to just sit there smiling at her.

Obviously, that would be a super weird thing to do. Definitely don't do that. So he pops to his feet and grabs his guitar from its stand. “I wanna hear this voice. Pick a song.”

“Any song?”

“Any song you think you would slay.”

“’Heart of My Own,’ Basia Bulat?”

“Can you get me the tabs on your small internet device?”

“I know you know it’s called a smartphone.”

While he tunes his guitar, she pulls up guitar tabs and passes her phone to him.

“Yeah, this looks doable. You ready?”

She nods and he begins to play. The instant she starts to sing, a clear, powerful soprano, he’s hooked. Somewhere in the part of him that used to have a heart, he feels something clench, as if joy is being compressed into a tiny burning flame. Something he’s not felt since before he died. If he’s being honest, something he’s never felt.

* * *

Julie stays for three weeks, and Luke hasn’t even thought about her leaving until the night that Reggie, Alex, and Flynn come over to watch _Galavant_ and Reggie asks, “So, are you just gonna live here now?”

Julie and Luke’s eyes meet across the living room. He shrugs, a nonverbal “you can stay as long as you need.” Julie tosses a piece of popcorn at her brother. “Why, you miss me?”

“Yes! Mom has started to say that I should ‘try to make something of my life.’ I’ve tried to explain that I’m dead and that that ship has sailed, but she’s claiming that it’s ‘not relevant.’” He wheels on Luke. “Are your parents this flippant about your death?”

“Nah, my parents go the other way. Every time they see me, they cry, so we don’t hang out much.”

Flynn kicks Reggie’s foot, but he raises his hands defensively. “How was I supposed to know his answer would be sad?”

“Because he’s dead, you doof!”

“Alex, please defend me.”

Alex, who has been texting up a storm all night, looks up blankly. “I probably agree with Flynn, but to be fair, I wasn’t listening.”

Julie grins. “Ooh, I see that face. Who are you texting?”

“Um…”

“Willie,” Flynn answers.

Alex gasps dramatically. “You traitor, you weren’t going to tell them!”

“I literally never made that promise.”

“Wait,” Reggie puts together the pieces, “Willie, as in the vengeance demon who owns the demon bar?”

“Okay, 1) he’s a reformed vengeance demon, 2) he’s mortal now, and 3) his hair is… very luscious.”

Flynn shakes her hands at Alex in despair. “You keep saying the third thing like it’s just as important as the first two, and that concerns me.”

“Well, he’s teaching me to do magic, and I learn best from pretty people.”

Julie leans forward to rest her chin on her fists and waggles her eyebrows. “Oh, he’s teaching you magic, is he?”

Flynn laughs. “Do you have any idea how many texts I get about how they ‘cast spells together late at night?’”

Julie whirls on Alex. “Why is she getting all the deep dish before me??”

“Because I don’t want you to slay him!”

“I don’t just go around slaying people! Has he done something actually wrong?”

Alex answers gingerly. “Apparently he once cursed a Potential to live as a quokka because she accused her neighbor of being a witch.”

“A Potential?” Julie looks between Alex and Luke.

“Potential Slayer,” Luke answers. “The girls around the world who _could_ become Slayers.”

Reggie cuts in. “Wait, a quokka? That doesn’t really seem like a punishment.”

“Yeah, I don’t get the sense that he was all that great at seeking vengeance? But he is really great at magic.” Julie, Reggie, and Flynn raise synchronized suggestive eyebrows. “Literal magic, guys!”

As the group falls into ribbing Alex about his potential relationship with Willie, Luke finds himself watching Julie’s face. When she thinks no one's looking, sadness creeps onto it, a sadness that he’s been ignoring in favor of enjoying his time with her.

It’s time for her to go home. And it seems like he may have to make the first move.

* * *

“Somehow, I should have known you were involved with this.” Ray scrutinizes Luke over his cup of tea. It had taken the ghost a while to convince the man to speak with him—Luke opted for poofing into the house in order to establish clearly that he wasn’t a vampire, but it turned out that that was, in fact, “absolutely fucking horrifying.” Ray had needed time to calm down, and even longer once the word “Watcher” had come into the conversation.

“I’m sorry. It’s not fair. Two Slayers in one family is unprecedented, if that helps.”

“It does not.” Ray leans back and studies him. “So, you’re here to convince me that my daughter needs to go out and fight demons every night?”

“No. Here to remind you that you don’t really get a choice.” Ray buries his face in his hands, which at least makes it a little easier for Luke to talk to him, because he really can’t take the tears. “There’s an apocalypse coming in the next few weeks. If Julie isn’t there to stop it, then best-case scenario, she dies the day of. Worst-case, she spends the rest of eternity being tortured in some gnarly hell dimension. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but Julie fighting is actually her best chance of survival.”

Ray lifts his tear-covered face. “As a father, is that what I’m supposed to do? Just let my little girl go out and risk her life every night?”

What can Luke even say to that? “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry, _but_.”

“Julie’s gonna fight. That’s who she is.” Ray opens his mouth, but Luke cuts him off. “I’m not talking about the Slayer, I’m talking about _Julie_ doing the right thing no matter what. If you don’t let her be the Slayer, then you won’t get to be in her life. That’s the deal. The way I see it, better to have her in your life as the Slayer, spend every single moment with her that you can, than not have her in your life at all.” He realizes belatedly that he might as well be talking to himself three weeks ago. “But that’s a choice you gotta make for yourself.”

He finally lets his eyes slide to Ray. The man sags his head into his hands again, but he nods.

They sit in silence for a long moment.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Ray murmurs.

Luke starts. It’s the first time anyone’s ever said it, ever acknowledged _his_ loss. When people talk about his death, the focus tends to be on the living people, like his parents, that he left behind. There’s genuine emotion causing a tremble in Luke’s voice as he replies, “Thank you.”

Ray finally drops his hands. “I don’t blame you.”

“I tend to show up with the worst news and ask the people you love to put their lives on the line. I don’t blame you for blaming me.”

Keeping his gaze on his cup of tea, Ray shakes his head. A long pause, then: “Did she suffer? The coroner said she didn’t, but I never believed it.”

The question should surprise Luke, but it doesn’t. “It wasn’t painless. But it was fairly quick.” Luke’s voice trails off, the memory of Rose yanking the axe out of her chest playing in his mind. “She was… so brave. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Ray smiles, his face wet. “That was my Rose.” He heaves a sigh. “Sometimes Julie reminds me so much of her.” But it isn’t a good thing.

“Yeah.” Luke is struck by the pain of it—every time Julie reminds him of her mother, she reminds him of how similar their fates are. It’s impossible to appreciate their similarities without fearing those similarities. “I want you to know that I’ll protect her with my… whatever it is I have now. Existence? I can’t make any promises about what happens to her, but I can promise that I’m always gonna value her safety more than I value my own.”

“Ah yes, because she’s the all-important Slayer.”

“No, because she’s Julie.”

Ray shoots him a sharp glance, and it’s like he’s seeing something in Luke that Luke himself isn’t yet prepared to see. The ghost squirms. He almost wants to ask, but… he needs to project himself as the competent Watcher, totally in control, to instill whatever confidence he can.

All Ray says is “I guess we’ll see.”

* * *

Luke knocks on the door of his own apartment. When Julie answers, confused, he steps aside to reveal Ray.

“Dad?”

Ray stays firmly in the hallway. “I have two conditions: I don’t want to hear about Slayer stuff in the house. And you’re still going to college, _mija_.”

Julie’s head nods at a mile a minute. “Okay.”

“Then get your stuff. We’re going back home.”

She grins and sweeps him in a hug. With tears in his eyes, he wraps his arms tightly around his daughter.

Julie bounds back to Luke’s bedroom to get her things. Ray follows her with his eyes, taking in the clearly one bedroom apartment, and shoots Luke a scathing look that terrifies him more than any vampire he’s ever faced. Rather than spend a single second longer in Ray’s very intense presence, Luke poofs into his room.

Julie glances up from the backpack she’s in the middle of packing and grins. “You went to my dad. That desperate to get rid of me, huh?”

“No, I just…”

“Luke, I’m kidding.” It’s the first time she’s called him Luke to his face, and if he didn’t know better, he’d think he was blushing.

“Figured he could use an ear. Sometimes Slayer stuff is just harder to talk about with the actual Slayer.”

That reminds him… As she zips up her backpack, he rifles through his bookshelf and pulls out a leather-bound journal.

“What’s that?”

He approaches her cautiously. “I know you want to know more about your mom. I wish I could talk about her, but it’s-"

“I get it.”

“No, you don’t, cause I don’t talk about it.” Her face softens at his honesty. “I didn’t have any siblings and my parents… they kinda forced me into the Watcher gig, and then I died on the job, and now we can’t really talk because they feel so damn guilty about it. Your mom, she was like a sister to me. She was my best friend and the first person who ever made me feel the way that I hear family is supposed to make you feel and I just… I’m not ready yet.” Julie is giving him that look again, the look she gives him when she wants to hug him. He holds out the journal to her. “But she’s your family too, and you deserve to know her.”

“What’s this?”

“Watchers’ diary. We keep journals of everything our Slayers do in the line of duty. Battles they fight, demons and magic they encounter.”

Like she’s holding an ancient sacred text, she strokes the cover delicately. “Her entire life as a Slayer,” she breathes.

“Not quite. I wasn't the best at keeping it updated, and my handwriting’s also… it’s not great. But there’s still a lot in there.”

She hugs it to her chest, making the same face she made when she hugged her dad. Then she seems to realize the implications of what he’s said.

“Do you keep a diary about me?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I read it?”

“Hell no.” She grins mischievously at him, and it warms his chest. “Someday though, we’ll talk about your mom. All the stuff I didn’t write down. I promise.”

“Thank you. For letting me stay, for my dad,” she nods to the living room, “for my mom.” She lifts up the journal. “This was perfect.” She reaches out for his hand and even though he knows better, he reaches out for her. But obviously her hand goes through his.

She huffs and bounces on her feet. Unamused, he chuckles. “This is an interesting little relationship you and I have.”

As she starts to turn away, he feels a tug to prolong the moment. “Wait: Magic: The Gathering.”

“What about it?”

“Two things. One, if the guys and I move game night to Tuesdays, do you wanna join?”

Her face lights up in one of those million-watt smiles that he feels would actually be doing damage to his heart if he still had one. “No more patrolling cemeteries for rogue vampires on Tuesdays?”

“Game night, then patrolling. I will even come with you.”

Another of those smiles. “Okay. What’s the second thing?”

“Your color combo. White-blue?” 

She smiles again. Not the million-watt smile, but something softer and more private. If he had to guess, he’d imagine that this was what his face looked like when she knew his playstyle. “Yeah, I’m white-blue.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episodes of _Buffy_ referenced in this chapter:  
> • “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date”  
> • The “I probably agree with Flynn, but to be fair, I wasn’t listening” is my version of Giles’ line in “Shadow” because I’m not going to write something in the Buffyverse and not include that line  
> 


	4. Better Give My Heart A Listen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Demons" by Macy Gray and Fatboy Slim

**September 2017**

“Luke, we _have_ to digitize your library. This is getting ridiculous.”

Luke glares at Julie over the pile of ancient demonology tomes he’s reading at the desk in his living room. “How many times do I have to tell you the Moloch story?”

The nineteen-year-old, who sits cross legged on his desk, rolls her eyes. “Okay, first of all, I think ‘my mom once scanned a demon into the computer’ is just an excuse for you to be a Luddite, and second of all, my mom slayed Moloch. So let’s just scan everything, I’ll slay anything that comes out of it, and then we’ll have a user-friendly database. Searching for keywords, Luke, not reading every single book you own whenever a new demon shows up.”

“So eager to slay. I remember when you were horrified by the idea of beheading a vampire and joking about having a machete.”

She swings her leg through him. “I’m still only joking. You were supposed to get me a machete for my birthday.”

“Your father hates me enough already. I’m not adding to it by buying you weaponry.”

“My dad doesn't hate you; he just thinks you’re going to get me killed. If you get me a machete, I’m going to be a lot harder to kill.”

He shoots her a pointed look. “There’s no urgent apocalypse clock ticking. I can research the Fyarl demon myself. You don’t need to stay if you’ve got an elsewhere to be.” But he doesn’t mean it. As much as Julie can be distracting, he loves her company and lately her being elsewhere has been more distracting for reasons he can’t really pinpoint.

Her phone, which sits on the desk between them, lights up with an incoming call. “Nick.”

Alright, he can pinpoint one reason.

She presses the decline button. He raises his eyebrows. “Trouble in paradise?”

“I never said it was paradise.” He forces his eyebrows to go higher. She rolls her eyes. “He’s started asking a lot of questions about the fact that I go out every night and that my body is occasionally covered in bruises”—Luke definitely doesn’t want to hear about Nick seeing Julie’s body—”and I can’t tell him those aren’t valid concerns because they are.”

“You can tell him the truth if you want. We’ve never been that good at the secret identity thing anyways. Also, I’m trying to establish myself as the cool, laidback Watcher.”

“I thought that was what the sleeveless shirts were for.”

“You’re very fixated on my shirts.”

“They’re noticeable.” She doesn’t quite meet his gaze. 

He nudges her side, his arm passing through. “Nick?”

“I don’t want to open his eyes to the supernatural horrors living in secret all around him and then, you know, dump him. Then he’ll just have to be a regular guy terrified of everything in the world who doesn’t have a Slayer girlfriend to protect him. If I felt more sure of him, then maybe, but—”

“Do you not feel sure of him?” Part of Luke feels extremely happy at the idea, and he staunchly refuses to think about why.

“He’s… fine. If I wasn’t the Slayer, I would keep dating him and see where it goes. I just don’t think I’m ‘confident about fundamentally disrupting his understanding of known reality’ level into him, you know?”

“Personally, I don’t think you should be dating someone if you can’t sound more excited than ‘he’s fine.’”

“Yeah, well, what do you know about dating? You don’t date.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh.” Her tone is careful, and he can't get a read on her reaction. 

“I mean, I can only date demons, and there’s a very small number of good demons and most of them are dating Alex, and the rest of them are sorta put off by the fact that my whole thing is slaying demons, and also I’m dead which some people say ‘isn’t their type,’ so I guess I don’t really date, no.” Her mouth wriggles, like she really wants to grin but she's trying to contain it for some reason.

“Please don’t date Willie. He and Alex are super cute.”

“You’re ducking the point. Why are you dating Nick if you don’t feel excited about him?”

She shrugs, like she has an answer that she doesn’t want to share. “Dating is hard when you have a destiny.”

“Jules.”

She meets his gaze, and he’s surprised by the pain in her eyes. “Fine, I’ll tell you. But then I’m going to say goodbye and walk out because I’m not interested in talking about it, okay?” He holds up his hands, conceding, and pushes his chair further away from his desk so he can watch her face.

“My mom was 22 when she died. And in my mind, that’s always been the timeline. If I’m lucky, I get five years as the Slayer. I’m almost halfway there, and there’s still stuff I want to do before I die. And one of those things is that I want to be in a relationship with the person I’m in love with.”

He’s too focused on her timeline to clock the implications of her phrasing. “You know that dating someone you’re not really interested in is the exact wrong way to go about that, right?”

She leans closer to him, making the area where his heart should be flutter. “BYE LUKE.” She grabs her bag and rushes out.

Luke buries his face in his hands. Both Julie’s mortality and her love life are topics he hates dwelling on, and here he’s been handed a surprise double whammy. “Fuck.”

“I’m going to be honest,” Reggie’s voice floats over from the other side of the living room. “I often feel like you two get so wrapped up in one another that you don’t notice I’m here.”

* * *

Alex strides into the apartment that the three guys share to find Luke pacing. He glances at Reggie, who is perched on the couch with his entire attention on his phone. “What’s going on?”

“He’s having a Julie crisis,” Reggie drawls.

“Ah. Is he coming to the obvious conclusion?”

“Not as of yet, no.”

“Alright then, I need a drink. Can I get you something?”

“Pigs’ blood?”

Luke spins towards Alex. “What’s the obvious conclusion??”

“That I need a rum and coke to have this conversation.”

Not letting it drop that easily, Luke follows Alex to the kitchen, with Reggie trailing reluctantly behind. Luke is about to start interrogating Alex when he realizes what Reggie is looking at. “Are you watching an insta live of a sunrise?”

“I miss the sunrise. I mean, not that I ever got up in time to see it when I was alive, but now I’m really feeling like I missed out. It’s so bright and shiny.”

Alex takes a bag of blood out of the fridge and, with a flick of a finger, floats it over to Reggie. “Catch.”

Reggie tucks his phone in his pocket and begins sipping on the blood bag. “Oh, before we get derailed by the Julie crisis, you should hear the actual big news of the day. According to Luke, Luke dates.”

“What? Are you talking about that one time you got coffee with Clem? Because Clem definitely isn’t interested in you.” Alex observes shrewdly as he charms the rum bottle to pour a generous thumb into his glass.

“Why wouldn’t Clem be interested in me?”

Reggie kicks Luke’s foot, unimpressed. “Oh, so because he’s a Loose-Skinned demon, he has to be interested in you?”

“That’s not—okay, Clem is not the point. I just haven’t met anyone who I click with, you know?”

Reggie gestures to Alex. “You see what I mean?”

Alex directs the Coke to add itself to his glass and stirs it by twirling his finger. “Give him time. He’ll get there.”

“ _Will he?_ It’s been two years.”

“Reggie, you’re immortal. You’re going to have to learn some patience.”

Luke groans loudly. “Are either of you gonna help me or are you just gonna be smug?”

Alex takes a deep sip of his drink and exhales blissfully. “Okay, Luke, tell me of your Julie crisis.”

“She wants to be in love before she dies and she’s going about it wrong.”

As if fact-checking, Alex glances to Reggie. “Her exact words were ‘I want to be in a relationship with the person I’m in love with,'” the vampire clarifies.

“Oooh, that’s different.”

“How is that different from what I said??”

Reggie rubs his face. “See, never gonna get there on his own.”

“Alex,” Luke begs.

Taking pity on him, the warlock gestures for Luke to sit. He pops up onto the kitchen counter. “It sounds like she’s already in love.”

Luke feels as if he’s been smacked in the face with a paperweight. “… with Nick?”

“No, not with Nick.”

“Then who is she in love with?”

“Julie hasn’t told me anything.”

“But you’re Alex. You don’t need to be told about feelings. You just, like, know. It’s your superpower.”

“I think my superpower is that I can do literal magic, but sure, basic emotional intelligence as well.” 

“Aleeeex.”

Alex sends Luke the same shriveling look he uses whenever Luke and Julie disagree about how to handle a Slayer thing, and Luke makes the mistake of asking Alex to pick a side. “Luke, I don’t have any information. I have a theory, but if Julie wanted you to know who she’s in love with, she would have told you.”

Luke’s voice turns pleading, as if he can somehow convince Alex that Julie’s just mis-filed some paperwork and would actually like Alex to correct the mistake. “Why wouldn’t she tell me? We talk about everything.”

Reggie snorts loudly. “No, you don’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

Reggie waves pleading hands towards Alex, who sighs and gestures for Reggie to go ahead.

“For starters, you haven’t told her you’re in love with anyone.”

“… cause I’m not?”

Reggie stares at him in disbelief, then begins shaking his head. “Nope.” He spins around and marches out of the kitchen. They can hear him saying, “nope, nope, nope” loudly to himself all the way down the hallway until he reaches his bedroom.

Alex just claps the air behind Luke’s back. “This is a journey you have to go on yourself, I’m afraid.”

* * *

Realistically, Luke knows there are only so many people Reggie and Alex could be talking about, even if Luke has become more sociable over the past year and a half. Aside from Clem (and he will go to his, well, second grave insisting that that _had_ been a date), he hasn’t really dated anyone. He and Reggie had a weird vibe for a few months, but neither of them ever pursued it because, well, that’s his Slayer’s brother. Only a year into their relationship, Alex and Willie are more married than most actually married people. Flynn is a steady part of their circle of friends (which she’s nicknamed the Scooby gang), but Luke’s relationship with Flynn is very tied to the group. Whenever everyone else leaves the two of them alone in a room, there are long awkward silences and a lot of pretending to be texting. (Luke doesn’t want to brag, but he’s really starting to nail the T9 on his new flip phone. (Julie has begged him to stop portraying that as a brag.)) 

Luke knows Alex and Reggie can only be talking about Julie, but he _isn’t_ in love with Julie. She’s his Slayer, one of his best friends, and she was indirectly responsible for bringing him back from the dead, so their relationship is intense and complicated and important, but that doesn’t mean he’s in love with her. Sure, there are moments when he gets lost in bantering with her, and moments when they fight together where they seem to read each other’s minds and exchange intense looks, but he has that with everyone he battles with. He constantly exudes a flirty energy. That doesn’t mean he’s in love with Julie.

He still feels very on display when he poofs to the cemetery the next night to meet with the rest of the Scooby Gang. Flynn and Julie, he notices immediately, are standing off to the side talking seriously, with Flynn shooting looks his way. Julie defiantly spins her favorite weapon, a hand axe like Rose’s old one with a wooden stake as the handle. She usually spins it when people try to tell her things she doesn’t want to hear. 

But of course, he’s not looking at them, because he’s not in love with Julie.

Instead, he tries to focus on the guys. Reggie is showing Alex and Willie something on his phone. Alex is standing behind Willie, with his elbow resting on Willie’s shoulder and his chin on his forearm, cheek pressed against Willie’s. All at once, Luke is hit with an acute pang of loneliness and longing. Not just for the romantic bond between the two, but also the casualness with which Reggie can lean into them. The easy touching between friends, bonding them to one another, tethering them to the world. Sure, Luke can touch Reggie and Willie, but at the end of the day, he’ll never feel that casual, easy connection to the living world ever again.

For a moment, Luke stands still, letting himself wallow in his pain.

Alex glances up and something of what Luke’s feeling must show on his face, because Alex cocks his head, concerned, and mouths, “You okay?”

Luke shakes his head slightly. He feels a brief heat on the side of his face, like someone is looking his way, but when he glances in that direction, Julie’s eyes are very determinedly set on Flynn’s face.

Trying to shake it off, Luke claps his hand to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, entire bus turned into vampires and buried today. Twenty-one people, and we gotta make ‘em all dust before they get past those fences.” He takes out a couple maps of the fresh graves they need to target.

“Is this gonna take long?” Flynn asks. “I have an essay to write.”

“If you can’t stay, you don’t have to.”

“Of course I have to.”

“… why?”

“FOMO. Obviously.”

“If we’re strategic about this, we should be able to get through it pretty quickly. There are thirteen people buried on the east side and eight on the west, so I figure four of us work the east, two the west, and if anyone finishes up early, go help out the other group?” Everyone nods, so he turns to Julie. “Julie, you take the west, and I’ll —”

“I’ll take Flynn.” She cuts him off, linking arms with her friend.

“Oh.” Normally, if they split into groups, Luke and Julie pair up. “You sure? Cause eight is a lot, might be good to have two supernatural people—”

“We’ll catch you later. Be safe, everyone.” She smiles encouragingly at everyone, not meeting his eyes, and heads toward the west side. Dazed, he passes the map to Reggie, who hands it to Flynn. He searches her face for clues as to what's going on with Julie, but of all the Scoobies, Flynn is the best at maintaining a deadpan.

Luke turns to the rest of the group. Part of him wants to ask if anyone else thinks that was weird, but he knows if he verbalizes it, then he’s saying that he thinks it’s weird and that just validates Alex and Reggie’s whole ridiculous theory. “Okay, let’s dust some vamps.”

* * *

Their fourteen vamps fall fast, too fast, and by the time they’re down to their last two, Luke is nervous. If it was this quick for the four of them, the Slayer should have finished ages ago. So he poofs over to the west side.

He’s lucky he appears behind a mausoleum, because things on the other side are… not great. Five vampires have Julie surrounded, and one is holding onto Flynn. But in the middle of it all is Julie, held up in the air by a tall, veiny, horned demon. Fuck, the Fyarl demon they’ve been hunting all week. Julie wriggles in its grip, unable to free herself. Which is terrifying in and of itself.

But as per Julie, she’s not focused on herself or even the Fyarl demon, but instead on the vampire holding Flynn. “Let her go. That’s your one warning,” she snaps.

“Or what? You’ll hurt us with your words?”

Realizes Julie is unarmed, Luke looks around and sees her axe gleaming in the grass. He steps forward silently, catching her eyes briefly as he picks up her weapon.

But the Fyarl demon won’t be killed by an axe. Only something silver being shoved into its heart.

He holds up five fingers where Julie can see them and counts them down. As he gets to two, he hears her say, “No, silly. With weapons.” He poofs over to the vampire holding Flynn and slams the stake into his heart from behind. The vamp explodes into dust and Flynn stumbles away, massaging her neck and coughing.

“Are you okay?”

She nods, waving him off. “Help Julie,” she rasps.

He poofs to his apartment and grabs the only silver item he owns: a teapot. Poofs back to the cemetery and tosses it into the air. Julie grabs it, shooting him a brief skeptical look, and slams the spout into the Fyarl demon’s chest. The demon crumples to his knees and she rolls, coming to an elegant landing just in time for Luke to poof next to her and toss her her axe.

She seizes it and swings it through the air, slicing off the nearest vampire’s head.

As one of the vampires tries to flee, Julie chucks her axe. It flies through the air, landing stake first in his heart. One of the closer vampires rushes towards her, thinking that she’s unarmed, but Luke poofs over to the fleeing vampire and collects the axe. He poofs back to Julie and throws it to her. She grins, partly at the astonished vampire who finds himself in front of an armed Slayer, partly at Luke. “Better than a boomerang.”

That smile, triumphant, vibrant, in control. It does something to him.

She kicks the vampire in the chest, sending him stumbling back, but he grabs her foot and tosses her through the air. Luke turns to fight the final vampire but Flynn, filled with indignant fury, has tackled him and seems to getting herself some vengeance.

The remaining vampire, engaged in a furious battle with Julie, rams backwards into Luke. Luke spins around and stabs his stake into the vampire’s back. As the vampire turns to dust, he realizes that his is not the only stake in the vampire’s heart. Julie has staked him from the front, and their stakes seem to touch as the vampire dissolves. They’re standing close, maybe closer than they’ve ever stood before, and she’s out of breath, gleaming with sweat and victory and power and fucking beaming at him and so gorgeous and in her element and he suddenly just knows.

“Jinx, you owe me a soda” is what comes out though. Because he’s _pathetic._

She lowers her axe but doesn’t move away from him. “But you can’t drink.” Her voice is hushed, like they’re having a private conversation.

“Can’t I just _want_ a victory soda? Why you always gotta make it a ghost thing?” He matches her volume, whispering back.

She bites her lip, smiling playfully. “Because I worry that an undrunk victory soda will feel lonely.”

“Fine, then, you can drink my victory soda.” Something about their closeness, their quiet voices, and the weird energy between them makes him feel like he’s asking her out, like “drink my victory soda” is an invitation to an event instead of just a weird thing to say. The slight hesitation from her makes him wonder if she feels it too.

“So basically, you’re inviting me to buy myself a soda.”

“The soda’s still for me. That bit’s important.”

“Julie.” Flynn draws their attention off one another. She raises a pointed eyebrow at her friend. “Weren’t you planning to study tonight? With Nick?”

Julie glances back at Luke for a second, like she thinks he’ll give her the answer. “Um, yeah. If we’re all done here?”

“Yeah.” He tries to smile, but he’s not sure he makes the muscles quite work right. It feels more like an aggressive spasm. “Do what you gotta do.”

* * *

The text an hour later asking him to let her in takes him by surprise. He grabs his keys and poofs down to open the door for her.

She slips into the apartment hallway with him. “Aren’t you not supposed to poof in public places?” she asks, her voice low.

“Everyone in this complex is of the spooky variety. What are you doing here?”

She glances at her feet quickly, then back up at him. “I broke up with Nick. And I owed you a soda.” She holds up a can.

He raises an eyebrow. “I like Grape Fanta?”

“You do.”

“Wow. I’m lucky I’m cute.” He rests his eyes on her face as he says it. He can feel the same weird energy from the cemetery, egged on by their hushed voices in the hallway. “You wanna come up?”

She nods and follows him. They stay silent the whole walk up to the third floor. He doesn’t know that they’ve ever been silent with each other for that long before, and it’s so awkward that he almost wishes he’d poofed up to avoid it, but the awkwardness feels meaningful.

The sounds of the door opening and closing and his keys being dropped on the counter are too loud in the silence between them. There’s a ring to it that feels… if he weren’t a ghost and they’d met normally, he’d feel like he was bringing her home for the night.

He turns back to her. Usually, she’d plop down on the couch or at his desk, but she’s hovering by the door, like she’s waiting for something. He moves close to her. Putting all his focus into his fingers, he gently pries the soda out of her hand. She looks up in surprised delight—taking something directly out of her hand like that is the closest they’ve ever come to touching. Normally, it’s more effort than it’s worth, but right now… it’s worth the effort.

“My soda,” he murmurs. He pauses for a second. “Present for you,” and slips it back into her hand.

She shakes her head slightly. “You’re ridiculous.” Her movements are controlled, her voice low. Maybe he’s projecting, but it seems like she’s feeling that same tense, sparking, post-date energy. Like something is going to happen that’s inevitable, and they’re just waiting to see who will push them towards it first.

But it’s impossible, so instead he asks, “Do you want to talk about the Nick thing?” and nods towards the couch area.

She shakes her head. “I’m good, it wasn’t…” She sits in the loveseat, sets the soda on the floor, and pats the seat next to her. He can’t help but notice that she’s chosen the smallest couch for them to share. “It feels mean to say it wasn’t that important, but it’s like you said. The most enthusiastic thing I could say about him was ‘it’s fine.’”

“So why do you have your thinking face on?”

“I don’t have a thinking face.”

“You do, it’s like this.” He tries to create as many wrinkles between his eyebrows as possible.

“That is not my face.” He just looks at her, steady on. She shrugs. “I thought I wanted something in my life that wasn’t about slaying. But my love life can’t be that, can it? Being the Slayer has become this huge part of who I am. If someone doesn’t know that part of me, they don’t know me.” Maybe he’s biased, but he agrees. He doesn’t love Julie because she’s the Slayer, but it doesn’t feel possible to really know Julie without knowing how she puts her friends first in battles or how she relentlessly resists the Council’s bureaucracy or what her face looks like when she wins a fight. “How did other Slayers date?”

“The old Watchers’ diaries don’t mention it that much. More focused on talking about demon physiology in excruciating detail, but when it does come up it tends to be reformed demons, vampires with a soul like Reggie, humans who know about all this stuff, and…” He hesitates, but every part of him is screaming _say it say it say it say it_ “... Watchers.” Her eyes snap to his. He’s silent for a moment, and neither of them says anything. That, more than anything, answers his question of whether he’s alone in this. If she didn’t feel the same way, she’d make a joke to diffuse the tension. Saying nothing leaves it there as a possibility. He swallows and tries to give them some conversational distance from the idea. “That doesn’t mean Slayers haven’t dated civilians—maybe most Watchers only write about the stuff that seems relevant to the job.”

“What do you write in your diaries?”

“Oh, all the dirt. How you eat tubs of frosting when you feel sad, how you leave teabags in mugs until they go moldy, how you sing to yourself when you patrol alone—”

“How would you even know that?”

“You get so into it that you never notice me. As your Watcher, I’d be concerned, but you somehow keep singing while fighting vampires? And now I’m gonna have to write an entry about your boring ex-boyfriend. Sorry, I’m just being thorough.” She picks up a pillow and drops it through his head. He shivers as it ripples through him. “Rude, dude!”

But then she shocks him by completely changing topics.

“Have you ever been in love?”

Oh, what a fun question. He’s not sure how much eye contact is the right amount of eye contact while answering that question. “I have.”

“What did it feel like?” There’s no added weight to the way she says it—she clearly doesn’t realize that he’s talking about her. He desperately wants to correct her but he also really can’t.

“Inevitable. Like as soon as we met, there was no other way it could have gone.” She looks up at him through her eyelashes, her face open and vulnerable and reflecting something back at him that he feels he’s displaying to her. He’s never wanted so badly to take the hand lying on the couch, and his hand twitches. It’s halfway towards hers before he remembers that it’s pointless. There’s a reality that he can’t ignore. “But I’m dead now, and that’s not fair to anyone.”

Her face closes down slightly and she nods. “I’ve never said I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For your death.”

He wants to be flippant, but… yeah. He’s dead. And it fucking sucks, and moments like this just remind him of how much it sucks.

“Can I give you a hug?” she asks.

“Literally, no.”

She grins. “I have an idea. Can I try something?” He nods. “Lay on your side.”

He lies down, stretching awkwardly along the length of the couch. She arranges pillows in front of his torso and legs, forming a line down his body, then hands him a pillow to put on his hip. Then she lies down on the other side of the pillow barricade and rests her hand on the pillow over his hip. If they were corporeal, if there were no pillows, they would be lying face-to-face and cuddling. This isn’t really touching. It’s more that he can feel a pressure in various parts of the pillows, and he knows it’s her. But it’s as close as they can get.

They lie there together for a while, and eventually her breathing gets steady and she falls asleep, her face inches from his.

When Reggie gets home early in the morning and sees them on the couch together, Luke nods at him.

“Yeah, okay. I got there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> funny-face made [this incredible gifset](https://pearlcaddy.tumblr.com/post/637084401216421888/funny-face-quote-taken-from-chapter-4-of-some) of the "inevitable" line and I'm utterly obsessed, so if you're a tumblr person, go show it some love!
> 
> Episodes of _Buffy_ referenced in this chapter:  
> • “I, Robot… You, Jane”  
> • “A New Man”


	5. Just A Hero On A Bridge That's Burning Down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Scars" by Boy Epic
> 
> Thanks so much for all the comments and kudos so far. This chapter has been kicking my butt for days, and you've encouraged me into finishing it.

**August 2018**

“Why is the apocalypse always about unleashing hell on earth?” Reggie pouts. “Just for once, I’d like us to be facing a villain whose evil scheme is to give us all puppies.”

“ _How_ would that be an evil scheme?” Alex asks.

“Well, Flynn’s mildly allergic.”

“Aww, thanks for remembering!”

It’s the night before (another) apocalypse, and the group has been up for hours in Willie’s new magic shop, the Magic Box, planning how to fight Caleb. They’ve long since passed the point of having coherent ideas and clear minds. Willie stands over the model of Caleb’s warehouse, which is currently populated with Reggie’s old Warhammer 40k figures as they try to plan tomorrow night's battle. Listlessly, the former vengeance demon flicks over a Daemon of Nurgle. He resets the figure and flicks it over again. He reaches to reset it yet again, but Alex grabs his boyfriend’s hand.

“I think you killed him, sweetie.”

Willie sighs and collapses into a chair. “I’d feel better if we could spread out our warlock power. I don’t like sticking us both on one spell.”

“Better both of us on one spell than me not being strong enough to maintain the de-zombification spell by myself. You do get what happens if I fail, right? Army of zombies.”

Willie turns his hand over in Alex’s to weave their fingers together. “You’re plenty strong enough to do that spell yourself. I wish you believed that.”

“Yeah,” Reggie smiles encouragingly. “Can you own your awesomeness for once?”

“Maybe we can test my ‘awesomeness’ when the stakes are less apocalyptic?”

“Alex is right,” Luke cuts in. “The zombies are just a distraction, but we need to be totally sure they’re not in the picture. We have to keep Caleb away from that magical battery. He taps into that, he starts melting the walls between us and all hell dimensions, and that’s not the feel-good study abroad experience any of you were looking for in your junior year.”

Alex nods. “Yeah, personally I’m leaning more towards ‘semester in Auckland’ than ‘semester in the seventh circle.’”

Luke glances over at Julie, only to realize that Julie isn’t there anymore.

He finds her in the back room, which Willie converted into a private Slayer gym. She’s working on a speedball, her punches landing with a nervous energy. He watches her for a moment, enjoying the total control and focus on her face as she hits the bag into submission. 99% of the time, Luke curses whatever forces of fate made this her destiny and handed her the shit end of the stick. But sometimes, seeing her in her element, in these quiet moments of confidence and power, he kind of thinks fate might have had a point.

He poofs onto the pile of mats next to her. “Elbow up more.”

She jumps. “Seriously? I don’t get enough of the undead jumping out at me in my day-to-day?”

“Keeping you on your toes.”

“Someday I’m going to slay you by accident, and I’m not gonna feel bad about it.”

“You can’t slay a ghost.”

She gives him an odd look. “Yes, you can. Have you never researched ghosts?”

Honestly, no. He’d tried once, but it had felt a bit like reading his own diary written by someone else with entirely different memories to his own. He hadn’t really been able to articulate _why_ it had made him so uncomfortable, but he’d quickly put the book down and never picked it up again.

“How do you slay a ghost?”

“You overload them with a current of mystical energies. Supernatural being plus magical currents creates some sort of short circuit.”

“Then I’ll be sure to keep my distance when you walk around with a current of mystical energies.” He quirks his head as she starts up on the speedbag again. “You okay?”

Her smile goes tense and her punches get faster. “There’s something about this one that feels… different.”

“Yeah, I’m not loving the whole ‘destroying the walls between us and hell’ thing. It’s super… what’s the opposite of rad? Dar?”

She finally steps back from the bag and collapses on the mat next to him. “I’m not even worried we can’t stop Caleb. Or his army of zombies. I just don’t see any way that we all survive this.”

“Is this a Slayer premonition thing?”

“No, just a feeling. But we haven’t lost anyone yet, and it feels like our luck has to run out. I mean, how many times have we faced the apocalypse? Seven?”

He leans toward her, mimicking nudging her shoulder with his. “I’ve done ten.”

“Brag about it, why don’t you?” She nudges closer to him, the tip of her shoulder slipping through his. Her face is so close; he should be feeling her breath. Ever since the night of the soda, they’ve been… different. She’s not dating anymore (he’s heard Flynn nagging her about it at Scooby meetings), she spends more time with him, and there are… moments. When he reaches for a weapon on the wall behind her and she doesn’t move out of the way to give him space. When he comes up close to inspect her hands for damage after fights. When they fall asleep together on the couch after a long night patrolling. When they watch _Pushing Daisies_ and get to the kissing scenes, and glance at one another, as if trying to figure out whether they too can kiss through plastic wrap. Countless moments of long, lingering looks, and hands sitting right next to each other on the couch.

Neither of them has said anything.

They don’t have to.

But it’s rapidly reaching the point where someone needs to. He needs to be responsible and remind her that he’s dead and that it’s not fair to her. She should be with someone who can hug her when she's sad, help her to her feet when she falls, shake hands with her dad. Someone who isn’t (as Flynn often pointedly describes him) glorified air.

But then she does things like this, where she gives him a smile that she doesn’t give anyone else, and it’s like someone is injecting pure happiness into his chest and…

He’s selfish. If he survives this apocalypse, he’ll try to be less selfish.

“Not really my brag. Three apocalypses in seven months—that was all your mom.”

“Do you…” She trails off. “Do you think she would have thought I was a good Slayer?” There's a surprising vulnerability to her voice. He turns fully to her, grabbing her gaze so she can see his sincerity.

“Jules, she would have been _so_ proud. You have done so much good.” Their faces are even closer now; he needs to diffuse this. “There's just one thing she wouldn’t have approved of.”

“What’s that?”

He taps the protection amulet. The amulet recognizes him as its true owner, so he’s always been able to touch it, even when it’s around Julie’s neck. He doesn’t tend to, because that’s asking for trouble, but it’s the night before his tenth apocalypse and he can’t help himself as he runs his finger along the chain. Anyone looking from afar would assume that he’s tracing her collarbone. Her eyes flicker closed, almost as if she can feel his touch.

She takes a moment to refocus on the conversation. “She didn’t like the color?”

“It was meant to be a present for your zeroth birthday, but she told me to ‘keep your superstitious crap, _mijo_.’”

“She _mijo_ ed you?” Her face lights up, and he realizes that, in his ignorance, he’d never thought about how much Julie might value that information. The look on her face is the same as when she asked what her mother would have thought of her as a Slayer. He suddenly gets that there’s a part of her that desperately wishes she could ask her mom what she thinks of Julie’s… whatever label Julie would use to describe Luke. A single word is all he can offer, but it’s not nothing.

“She also liked to call me the ‘well-intentioned disaster child.’” Julie laughs. “Anyways, that was the only reason I was wearing the amulet when I died.”

She runs her nail over the chain, her fingers overlapping with his. “Well, I got it eventually.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Over twenty years late.”

“Sorry. I got a little dead along the way.”

Their faces are so close that he can’t even take in all of her face. It would be so so easy to kiss her, if it weren’t literally impossible.

He pulls away reluctantly. “Come on, let’s take your mind off the apocalypse for a night. Can’t have my Slayer worn out for the big day.”

* * *

The Scooby gang lounges on the couches in the living room of the guys’ apartment, watching Luke dubiously as he presents their collection of instruments: Alex’s drums, Reggie’s bass and banjo, Luke’s guitars, Julie’s keyboard.

"Okay," Luke dances on the balls of his feet, “‘Drop the Needle.’”

Alex, Reggie, Julie, and Flynn look nonplussed, but Willie grins. “Fuck yeah.”

“Ohhh,” Flynn realizes. “This is an old person thing.”

Alex nudges her. “Please stop calling my boyfriend an old person.”

“He’s literally a thousand years old, Alex, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“‘Drop the Needle,’” Luke cuts in, “was a vinyl game. You drop the needle on a random spot on a record and people have to name the song and the group.”

“Oh, right, a vinyl game. Because you’re an old person,” Flynn teases.

Julie shakes her head. “Not that old. He was just the kind of person who still listened to vinyl because it’s ‘the only way to listen to music.’” He can’t help but marvel at how Julie manages to both defend and tease him at the same time.

He points to her, defensive. “I have never told you that.”

“You didn’t have to. You exude that energy.”

Flynn cups her hands around her mouth and whispers loudly, “She’s saying you’re a pretentious dick.”

Luke rolls his eyes fondly and tries to get them back on track. “Okay, but the game now is, one person plays part of a song, any part of any song. The first person who can sing along with the right lyrics gets the point.”

He starts, riffing out the Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses.”

Willie groans. “Damn, I don’t remember any of the lyrics anymore.” But Julie grins and begins to sing, locking her eyes on his. To be fair, it’s a bit of a gimme: some nights, when they’ve exhausted their brains with Slayer talk, they have jam sessions. But to be also fair, she’s his dream girl.

_And her footprints make you follow  
Where the sky loves the sea  
And when your fingers find her  
She drowns you in her body_

Oh dear. Maybe the wrong part of the song to play. Definitely not something he’d been prepared for her to sing at him. He quickly stops playing and gestures to her. “You have the floor.”

Julie sits at the piano and starts playing. He vaguely recognizes it—it’s Alicia Keys, and for some reason Julie often sings it while she’s slaying, but he can’t say he knows the words.

Flynn and Alex, however, immediately begin singing. As soon as they realize they’re both singing, they dramatically perform the lyrics to one another.

_I know some people search the world  
To find something like what we have  
I know people will try, try to divide, something so real  
So till the end of time I'm telling you there ain't no one_

“Okay, so shared points for—”

But Julie jumps into singing now, the trio refusing to be stopped.

_No one, no one  
Can get in the way of what I'm feeling  
No one, no one, no one  
Can get in the way of what I feel for you_

_Oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh_

Reggie joins in, singing “ _Hey_ ” to the beat. Startled, Luke looks to Willie, who can only shrug in confusion.

_Oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh, oh oh oh oh oh, ohh_

As the song comes to a close, Flynn dissolves into giggles. “Point has to go to Reggie, the real MVP.” 

Reggie has them all nervous when he grabs the banjo and starts furiously plucking a bluegrass song. But Julie yells “yes!” and starts singing:

_I know your parents don't like me  
They drove me away from your door  
Had my life to live over  
I'd never go there any more_

Reggie jumps in, harmonizing with an ease that suggests hours of practice:

_Roll in my sweet baby's arms  
Roll in my sweet baby's arms  
Lay around the shack till the mail train comes back  
And roll in my sweet baby's arms_

Julie bursts into laughter. “That’s the sound of my childhood.”

“What?” Luke stares at her.

“When Reggie was learning banjo, he practiced that constantly because he wanted to be Earl Scruggs. So when we were like, eight? we ran around the house singing that all the time.” Luke continues to stare at her. “Oh, we didn’t know what the song was about.”

Now it’s Reggie’s turn to stare. “THAT’s what that was about? That was _not_ an appropriate duet for us.”

“Reggie,” Flynn groans. “ _Roll_ in my sweet baby’s arms? It’s not subtle.”

“I thought they were dancing!”

“Then it would have been ‘spin!’”

Julie laughs. “He also didn’t know what that Divinyls song was about.”

Reggie sticks his tongue out at her as he returns to the couch. “You are the worst sister.”

She slips back onto the piano bench and pretends to flip her hair. “I’m the best sister. Three years, and I’ve never staked you.” 

The night continues, with Reggie quickly pulling into the lead with a surprisingly broad range of musical knowledge, and Luke quickly falling into last place because of his absolutely dismal knowledge of any music from the past two decades.

But as he looks around at this group of people, he marvels at how they’ve managed to carve out this weird pocket of bliss for themselves in the middle of the apocalypse. Three years ago, he’d accepted that he would spend the rest of his existence living a half-life separated from all the people around him. Now… he’s still a ghost, and he is still living a half-life in a lot of ways. But moments like this, surrounded by joy and laughter and nonsense that has nothing to do with slaying, he feels human in a way he didn’t even when he was alive. For a minute, he actually feels _lucky_.

Luke’s so wrapped up in the feelings of warmth and happiness and nonsense that he doesn’t notice that Willie, Julie, Flynn, and Reggie have been furtively texting one another the whole time. In fact, he doesn’t notice that anything is going on until Julie guesses Reggie’s rendition of Eric Church’s “Springsteen” and Reggie stays up front and insists, “We should try a group number.” He switches out his banjo for his bass.

As Julie heads to the piano, she sets her phone in front of Luke with guitar tabs. “You too, Watcher.”

He’s about to protest that this isn’t the game, when he sees the name of the song. He quickly jumps up and grabs his guitar.

Alex glances between Willie and Flynn. “What’s happening…?” But neither of them look confused. Julie nods Luke and Reggie in.

Willie immediately gets on his knees in front of Alex. Alex stares at him. “What are you doing?”

The vengeance demon grins and speaks the opening line of the song. “ _Sit down, breathe, and just listen_.” Then he begins to sing:

_I know it's bad when we look out  
But bad, bad people don't live in our house so  
I'm gonna look good for you, honey  
Get myself together, spend you all of my money, yeah  
And I know it's hard enough to love me  
But woke up in a safe house singing, "Honey, let's get married"_

Alex’s face bursts into the biggest grin Luke has ever seen. With an answering smile, Willie opens a ring box and launches into the chorus:

_Don't wanna walk alone  
So let's get married  
I don't wanna walk alone  
Let's just get married—_

Alex cuts him off with a kiss. “Obviously.”

Willie beams. “Yeah?”

“Most of those lyrics aren’t really relevant for us, but yes, yes, yes.”

Flynn lets out an excited squeal and rushes to the kitchen to uncork a bottle of champagne.

“Babe, it was, like, this close to being Jason Derulo.”

Alex kisses him again. “The song is perfect. Thank you for not proposing to me with Jason Derulo.”

Luke sidles in next to a grinning Julie and murmurs, “Who’s Jason Derulo?”

She laughs at him, the way she always does when he reveals his ignorance of modern life. “Pop, R&B singer. You probably wouldn’t like him. I don’t even know if his albums are available on vinyl.”

He sticks his tongue out. “What’s the song?”

She leans closer to him and sings softly, keeping her eyes on his:

_105 is the number that comes to my head  
When I think of all the years I wanna be with you  
Wake up every morning with you in my bed  
That's precisely what I plan to do_

She gestures her finger impatiently, like she's fast-forwarding through the song to get to:

_I'll say will you marry me_

Luke doesn’t know when Alex and Willie first looked at one another and realized that something had shifted from “I love this person” to “oh, yeah, this is my person forever.” He wonders if it was some beautiful, personal, romantic moment. For Luke, apparently, it’s this moment of Julie quietly singing a random song to him that, yeah, he doesn't like.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

He forces a smile. “Yeah, Willie’s was better.”

Flynn swoops out of the kitchen with champagne in random mugs.

“Let’s drink, bitches!”

Luke clears his throat loudly. “But also remember that there’s an apocalypse tomorrow.”

Flynn shoots him a look of deep disappointment that reminds him eerily of Quentin Travers. “Okay, let’s celebrate boringly with a single drink, then save the world, and then tomorrow night, we’re going to the Bronze and we’re going to rage.”

“I’ll allow.”

Julie beams up at Luke and nods him toward the group, and it’s this celebration, with his five favorite people in the middle of the end of the world, that he carves on his heart. Happiness is fragile in their line of work, and so he tries to trap every second of this in a bottle.

* * *

He’s reminded unpleasantly of the fragility of happiness the very next night because halfway through their battle at Caleb’s warehouse, Luke finds that he can’t poof in and out anymore. Which is basically what their entire plan relied on.

Willie bites his lip hard enough to draw blood, horrified. “He must have already activated the battery. The mystical energies he’s tapping into are distorting reality, messing with your powers.”

“The battery’s already active??” Reggie exclaims. “Do we have a plan for that?”

They do not.

Julie takes command. “For now, we focus on getting rid of Caleb and his army. Then we’ll figure out how to shut down the battery. Flynn, Reggie, you protect Willie and Alex while they cast their spell. I’ll go after Caleb.”

She sprints off, but Luke hurries after her in time to hear her gasping for air. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I feel... weak.”

His Watcher brain whirs. “I guess that makes sense? Slayers are supernatural entities. The mystical energies are probably messing with your powers too.”

She stops short. “I’m a supernatural being?”

“Yeah? I thought you knew that.”

“I just hadn’t thought about it like that.”

They’re interrupted by a loud shriek from above and glance up in time to see a dragon fly overhead.

Julie stumbles. “There are _dragons_?”

“Not in our reality. The battery must already be weakening the walls between dimensions.”

“Then we have less time than we thought.”

“You got any ideas?” he asks.

If the situation were less dire, maybe Luke would have noticed the look on Julie’s face, but now isn’t the time for the nuances of facial expressions.

They reach the main room in Caleb's warehouse and as they barge in, Luke’s eyes immediately go to the giant ball of bright blue light crackling in the center of the room. This close to the battery, it’s almost like he can feel the magical parts of his body fizzing. Julie shudders too, clearly feeling the same effect.

Caleb steps out of the shadow, wielding a long sword. He smiles in that creepy way of his. “Julie, Luke, always a pleasure. I’m afraid you’re a little late.”

As if to prove his point, there’s another loud shriek that sounds suspiciously like a second dragon.

Luke draws his own sword. “Better late than never.”

He launches himself at Caleb, who quickly locks Luke’s sword into his. Luke grunts, struggling to get his sword free... when he realizes that Julie is nowhere to be seen.

“Jules, a little help??”

He and Caleb rotate as they desperately try to break the deadlock, and that’s when Luke sees Julie facing the battery, staring down the crackling energies. She glances over at them.

“Luke.” Her eyes meet his, and there’s something in them that he’s never seen before. “I’m in love with you. Thought you outta know.”

His jaw drops open in disbelief. His whole body wants to scream, “I love you too,” but he’s literally in the middle of a swordfight and there’s an apocalypse and these are words they can’t say, words she’s just said as if there are no more consequences… 

That’s when he finally pieces together her plan, her words from the night before echoing in his head: _supernatural being plus magical currents creates some sort of short circuit._

“Julie, no!” He drops his sword and dashes after her. He feels Caleb’s sword gouge him, but he’s a ghost, that doesn’t matter, none of this matters, all that matters is that a supernatural being can shut down the battery and that supernatural being needs to be him.

He almost catches up to her, and he tries to grab her hand to stop her, but his hand goes through hers, because _of course it does_ , and before he can so much as take another step, she’s jumped into the battery.

The energies take over her body, crackling through her and lifting her into the air. Her whole body vibrates violently, lighting up blue, and then with a loud, eerie scream, the battery implodes and disappears. Her body crumples on the ground, limp.

Luke doesn’t remember collapsing to his knees, but he must because he can feel the concrete. He doesn’t remember crying, but he must because his face is wet. He doesn’t remember screaming, but he must because his voice is hoarse for days afterwards.

What he does remember is scrambling over to her body and shaking her shoulders and realizing that, for the first time in his afterlife, he can touch her, the same way he’s able to touch books, or weapons, or soda cans… or any other inanimate object.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *highlights the “Angst with a Happy Ending” tag and hides*
> 
> Music referenced in this chapter:  
> • Cream’s “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” (as a nod to “Band Candy”/”The Body”)  
> • Alicia Key’s “No One”  
> • Flatt & Scruggs’ “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms”  
> • Eric Church’s “Springsteen”  
> • Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” (as a nod to “Lie to Me”)  
> • Bleachers’ “Let’s Get Married”  
> • Jason Derulo’s “Marry Me”
> 
> Episodes of _Buffy_ referenced in this chapter:  
> • “The Gift”  
> 


	6. How A Life Can Move From The Darkness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "I Wanna Get Better" by Bleachers
> 
> This is the Angst Chapter, and then I promise the next chapter is the Fluff Chapter.

**2018?**

Luke remembers when Flynn and Julie made him watch _New Moon_. There’s a scene after Bella and Edward breakup where the camera spins around Bella sitting in the same chair as months pass, and Luke couldn’t stop laughing at it. His laughter had earned him many punches through the arm (which he obviously hadn’t felt, but the point had been made.) But now he kind of gets it.

Time is spinning on around him. He knows, because he owns a calendar and Alex is the kind of person who crosses days off the calendar whenever he comes over to visit. (He lives with Willie now. (Luke thinks he lives with Willie now. He’s not really sure.)) But everything feels disconnected from time and from reality and from him.

He doesn’t know how they get through the first few months, because they’ve all suffered the same loss. They take turns taking care of one another, he guesses. When Reggie blasts Flatt & Scruggs for twenty-four hours without pause and loudly sings the harmonies by himself, Alex and Luke come and hold him until he finally breaks down in tears. When Alex and Flynn try to watch _Queer Eye_ without Julie for the first time and have to pause every thirty seconds, Willie is there holding their hands. And when Luke can’t get out of bed for four days straight, it’s Ray of all people who sits with him and tells him that he knows. Luke gets the sense that Ray isn’t talking about the loss of Julie, but about the loss of the love of his life.

A new Slayer is called in Glasgow, he hears. The Council doesn’t ask him to be her Watcher. Maybe he could move to Scotland anyways. Provide support where it’s needed. (He hears there’s a Hellmouth under the Tennent’s Brewery.) But there’s an unguarded Hellmouth in Sunnydale and he isn’t ready to leave the memories of her behind.

Vampires keep coming, and the group keeps fighting, and then months have passed and there’s another apocalypse, because the apocalypse still comes even when there’s no Slayer.

But even with him, Reggie, Alex, Flynn, and Willie fighting, it looks like this may actually be an apocalyptic apocalypse. An army of vampires invades the town, and the Scooby gang are unable to stop it. This is how the world ends—not with a grand plan or with the opening of the Hellmouth, but just a lot of biting immortals.

Luke has been fighting for two hours straight, which might explain why he doesn’t notice that Alex, Reggie, and Flynn have slipped away until they run up to him. If he were less exhausted, maybe he would notice the smiles refusing to leave their faces, but he is feeling pretty desperate. 

Reggie speaks first. “Hey, Luke, you know what we could really use right now?”

“A miracle?”

“But specifically, what kind of miracle?”

Luke rubs a hand down his worn face. “I dunno, Reg, what kind of miracle?”

“A Slayer.”

He drops his hand, and turns to glare at the vampire. “Dude, why the fuck would you—”

Then he sees the figure in the alleyway behind them. Dressed in the black dress they buried her in, covered in dirt, with cuts all over her hands like she just dug herself out of her own grave.

“Julie.” Luke honestly has no idea how he stays standing. His whole body feels light, numb, tingling—like it’s about to give out.

She does something with her mouth, as if she’s trying to smile but hasn’t quite remembered how those muscles work. “Hey, Luke.” Her voice is hoarse, but it’s _her_ voice, it’s _her_ …

“H-How—”

Alex explains. “There’s a resurrection spell that can bring people back when they die of purely mystical causes. Willie researched it, I cast it. It was… really fucked up, actually.”

Reggie shudders. “Yeah, Alex had to eat snakes. Didn’t warn us that was going to happen.”

“I didn’t eat snakes, I swallowed them,” Alex clarifies, as if this distinction is somehow meaningful. But his head snaps back around to Julie. “And it was totally worth it and I’d do it again. We’re so glad you’re back.”

Flynn cuts through their banter and meets Luke’s gaze. “It’s really her,” she assures him gently. “But, reunion’s gonna have to wait. Julie, how do you feel about slaying, like, 80 vampires?”

Julie takes the stake that Flynn hands her. “You guys really suck at welcome back parties.”

Luke doesn’t think he’s ever been so effective at fighting before in his life.

* * *

**December 2018**

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Alex and Luke sit in the Bronze, the din of other people in the club making the surreal day feel more real. Reggie and Julie have gone home to visit her parents. Luke doesn’t expect to see her for several days. He’s so glad that Ray of all people gets to spend Julie’s first days back with her, but… it’s really hard having her out of his sight. Alex slides a glass of alcohol across the table for Luke to look at. “We didn’t know if it would work.”

“So what, you didn’t want to get my hopes up?”

“Kinda, but that wasn’t the main thing.”

“Then what?

Alex softens, sympathetic. “You know what.” Luke glances at him through red-rimmed eyes, utterly wrecked. “If she’d come back wrong… we can’t have a demon or an evil version of Julie going around with Slayer powers. Luke, if any part of what came back wasn’t Julie, you know we would have had to destroy her. And if any part of what came back _was_ Julie, can you honestly say you would have been able to?”

Luke tries to imagine the scenario, but his mind rejects even the hypothetical. But he’s her Watcher. He needs to be objective. “I could have handled it.”

“I was never going to put you through that.”

“Would you have told me? If it hadn’t worked.”

Alex’s hesitation answers for him. “Luke, can you please stop being depressing and just be happy that she’s alive again?”

“She still died. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t! Because I didn’t!” Everything that Luke has carried through months of grieving, and years of pre-grieving before that, comes bursting out. “I spent three years thinking I knew what it would feel like when she died. Protecting myself and preparing myself for the worst possible death, for feeling utterly destroyed and ripped apart and meaningless, and you know what her dying turned out to be? A million times worse. I know what it’ll be like when she dies. I know every single fucking second of that, and I’m gonna spend the rest of her life knowing that.”

Alex twitches a hand out to hug him, then draws it back. “We’re all feeling that. You’re not alone in this.”

“But I should have figured out her plan. I’m the Watcher, and she’s the one who figured out how to shut the battery down. I should have been the one who-”

“And then I’d be sitting here having the same conversation with Julie. Luke, what’s done is done. She’s back. Either you can spend the rest of her life hiding from her, or you can spend time with the woman you love.”

Luke covers his eyes, remembering her last words to him. Easier said than done.

* * *

The first couple weeks of Julie being back are awkward in a way he would never have guessed. They haven’t always gotten along but they’ve never been awkward before. He’s not sure whether he’s done something wrong or whether it’s something she’s doing with everyone. When the others ask where she was, the description she gives is a version of the one he gave of his between-time. There’s something about the explanation that rings false for him, but he's too scared to ask. Too scared that he might make the gap between them worse.

The longest conversation they have is one day when she sees his face in full light. “You look older.”

“I’ve been visually aging this whole time. Just another part of my ‘abnormal presentation of the afterlife’ that the Council doesn’t understand.”

“I never noticed.”

“Guess cause you used to see this work of art every day.” He chuckles awkwardly as he waves at his face.

She just hums and turns away.

He’s so focused on trying to figure out how to resurrect the bare minimum of their friendship that he’s really not prepared for the moment when everything changes.

They’re at the cemetery and Julie is fighting a vampire and it’s so ordinary, and then the vampire kicks her and Julie rams into Luke and they both fall backwards.

All the air goes out of him, partly from the impact but mostly from the shock. Julie shoves herself to sitting and stares at him. “What?”

Luke can only stare back until he sees the vampire rushing at them. “Julie.”

She grabs the stake and flings it full power into the vampire’s chest, dissolving her to dust. Julie leaps to her feet and backs away from Luke.

“What just happened?”

He gets up, but she skitters back like a frightened cat. Holding up his hands in a “I mean you no harm” gesture, he moves toward her slowly. “Just checking.” She nods, trembling.

He puts his hand on her arm.

Their shocked gazes lock.

On the one hand, it just feels like an arm. It isn’t like a choir of angels begins singing or like her arm really feels fundamentally different from any other human arm. But on the other hand, _it is Julie’s arm._

Yanking herself free, she stumbles away from him.

Not to be presumptuous, but Luke would have assumed that if they could magically touch, it would be a good thing. Not an instant relationship thing by any means, but a good thing nonetheless. But she’s recoiling as if this is her worst nightmare.

“Alex…” she forces out. “He got the resurrection spell wrong. I came back wrong.”

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

“Julie, we don’t know that.”

“You can only touch demons. I must be—” She can’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

“We don’t know what I can do. We’ve only ever been guessing. There’s no precedent for me.”

“But I’m different. Something about me is different. I’m… wrong.”

“We’ll get Alex to run some tests. Julie, this doesn’t have to mean anything bad.” He reaches for her hand, but she whips it away.

“Don’t touch me!” There’s a vicious edge to her voice that he’s never heard directed at him before. “I want to talk to Alex.”

* * *

As Alex finishes running his tests, Willie slips out into the apartment hallway to talk to Luke.

“Well?”

“I mean, there’s not really a demon detection spell, but there’s a few things that only work on demons and they’re not working on her. She kinda just seems like Julie.”

Luke hadn’t really thought that she was a demon, but it’s a relief nonetheless. “So it’s me, not her.”

Willie shrugs. “Your whole ghost thing has always been a little weird, so that wouldn’t really be a surprise. And the whole ‘can only touch demons’ thing is a bit… it lacks poetry, you know? Most of this supernatural shit’s got some poetry to it. Like, I dunno, maybe you can only touch beings whose ‘souls have been forged by magic.’”

“And bringing her back with a spell forged her soul with magic?”

“I dunno, bro. You’re a little weird, she’s a little weird. I don’t think anything’s wrong with either of you. Bringing her back probably just made her fulfill some technicality that qualifies her for your touching list.”

“Dude.”

“Sorry, phrasing. I’ll never say touching list again.”

They exchange a glance and Luke huffs out a laugh.

“Is she still…”

“Super freaked? Yeah.” Willie goes silent for a moment, then nods for them to move to the living room, further away from the hearing radius of the door. Willie perches on the back of the couch. “I'mma be honest, I don’t really think it’s about you.” It’s sort of a relief to hear, because Luke hopes so but he doesn’t want to assume. “The vibe I get is that she wants there to be a supernatural explanation because she’s not feeling how she thinks she should be feeling about being back. Which… I dunno about you, but that whole ‘it was like being asleep’ thing feels a bit,” he nods to Luke, “plagiarized.”

Again, Luke’s glad to hear Willie say it—the ex-demon is older than all of them combined, and he knows more about magic than any of them ever will. Luke’s inclined to trust his judgment over any of theirs.

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. What do you think? She was actually in a hell dimension?”

“I’ve had friends get trapped in hell dimensions before, been in a few myself, and … obviously, they’re all different, and people react differently to trauma, but she doesn’t seem traumatized. It’s more like…”

“… being here is the trauma.” It pains Luke, because the contrast between the bubbly, joyful, vibrant Julie the night before her death and the withdrawn, quiet, empty Julie now is so present every time he interacts with her. The idea that all the things that used to bring her so much happiness now cause her pain makes him ache. “So, what… a heaven dimension?”

“Something like that.” Willie sighs heavily. “The Slayer finally at peace and then yanked back to this hellscape. Bro, I wouldn’t have suggested that resurrection spell if… She died in a magical battery that was connected to all hell dimensions. I assumed that’s where she went. It seemed like a rescue mission.”

Luke feels ashamed, because Willie had given a thought to where she’d gone. All Luke had known was that Julie wasn’t there with him, and that would have been enough for him to try a resurrection spell if he’d known they existed.

The door to Alex’s old room opens, and Flynn and Alex step out. Flynn makes eye contact with Luke, gives him a sad smile, and nods her head to send him in.

He steps inside cautiously. Julie is huddled on the bed, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by small bowls of mystical herbs and he doesn't think he's ever seen her look so small. She glances up at him and twitches a smile. Leaving plenty of space between them, he sits at the other end of the bed.

She fists her fingers in the blanket. “I’m sorry. I kinda freaked out at you.”

“You’re good.”

She opens her mouth, but seems to be unable to find any words.

“Jules, if you…” How to phrase this? “You don’t have to feel any kinda way about… being brought back, okay?” She meets his gaze, surprised. “Like, whatever you’re feeling, it’s valid and you can talk to me about it. If you’re… not happy or you’re mad or whatever, it’s not gonna hurt my feelings, I’m not gonna take it personally. And if you don’t wanna talk and you just wanna sit in silence or watch something, then I’m here too. Or if you want me to leave… Whatever you need. You don’t have to take care of us. Let us take care of you, okay?”

She takes it all in, blinking back tears. The silence in the room rings for a solid minute before she manages to get words out.

“How did you get better? The first year or so that we knew each other… you didn’t talk about it a lot, but you were in a lot of pain.” She looks at him, and he can only nod. Of course she knew. “But by the time I… left, you seemed to be in less pain. How’d you do it?”

“Um, a few different things. Therapy. The Watchers’ Council is maybe borderline evil, but they do employ some pretty rad therapists.”

“Could you get me a number?”

“Of course.”

“What else?”

He chuckles awkwardly. “Um… _Saga_.”

“ _Saga_ … like the comic series?”

“Yeah. I was in a comic shop and I, um, definitely paid for the first trade…” She glares at him. “It was early ghost days! I didn’t have the ability to hold money yet. Anyways, read it, loved it because—”

“It’s _Saga_.”

“And I wanted to know what was gonna happen next and so every month I had something to look forward to. And by the time _Saga_ went on hiatus, I had _The Good Place_ and then I had _The Dragon Prince_ , and I just kept filling my life with things to look forward to. Including people. Especially people.”

He smiles at her, and she smiles back tentatively. Then, like that amount of eye contact and happiness is overwhelming, she looks away. “Is _Saga_ back from hiatus yet?”

“Nope.”

“Damn, how long does a girl need to be dead to get some more _Saga_?” It’s meant to be a joke, but she delivers it with too much heaviness. But she shoots him a dark smile anyways. “You and Reggie aren’t the only ones who get to play the dead card now.”

There’s another silence, then she asks tentatively, “What were… we were in the middle of watching something when I left?”

“ _Avatar: The Last Airbender_.”

She gets her laptop from her bag. “Can we watch _Avatar_?”

He pulls the show up on Netflix (he uses laptops now!) and they start to watch their next episode.

Seven minutes in, she shifts a little closer to him.

Twelve minutes in, she shifts closer still.

Fifteen minutes in, she rests her head on his shoulder.

They watch three episodes before she closes the laptop and they sit in silence for a long moment. Without looking at him, she whispers, “I wasn’t really in a timeless grey void.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not yet, but someday.”

And a week later, they do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episodes of _Buffy_ referenced in this chapter:  
> • “Bargaining”  
> • “After Life”  
> • “Smashed”  
> • “Dead Things”  
> 


	7. I've Been Waiting So Long To Be Where I'm Going

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Sunshine of Your Love" by Cream

**December 2019**

The scythe comes as a big surprise. It really feels like the Watchers’ Council should have known that there was an ancient tomb hidden under Sunnydale that was storing a powerful weapon forged specifically for the Slayer.

To be honest, Luke is starting to question whether the Watchers’ Council actually does anything.

“It’s so shiny!” Julie twirls the scythe through the air, taking advantage of all the open space in the Magic Box. She’s already basically an expert at maneuvering the scythe: it’s essentially a longer, fancier version of her axe, with a sharp red blade for decapitating vampires and a long wooden stake at the handle.

“You’ll definitely have to accessorize with that,” Flynn observes with a grin.

“Ooh, maybe some red hair extensions?” Julie suggests.

Julie is lighter now, for the most part. After a year of therapy and support, she’s, well, not back to who she was before (as Julie puts it, “that girl literally died”), but she has more good days than bad days and her bad days are manageable.

As for Luke’s relationship with her… in some ways, it feels like it did before she died. There’s a lot of standing close and intense banter, but very little touching and no open talk of feelings. But there’s a greater depth to their intensity. He was there for a lot of her worst days, ready for a chat or a hug or a TV marathon or a jam session or whatever she needed, crawling down into her misery to fight alongside her. They’ve walked through the fire and forged a bond that extends beyond just Slayer stuff.

Which is great. It's just that he can almost feel his heart beat every time he looks at her and he doesn’t know what the hell to do about it. The past year has been devoted to getting her resettled in the world of the living, and he feels it should be up to her when/if their relationship changes, but they’ve been in this not-a-relationship-but-also-kind-of-a-relationship for so long that he’s starting to wonder if it’ll ever change.

Julie sweeps the scythe through the air just as Reggie saunters over to them, snacking on a blood popsicle. He quickly ducks.

“WHAT HAVE WE SAID ABOUT WOODEN WEAPONS NEAR REGGIE.”

Julie grins and sets it down on the table. “Sorry, I’m just happy. This scythe feels like it could be big.”

Alex runs a finger over the blade. “Does it have one of those mystical names?”

“What’s a mystical name?” Luke asks.

“You know, Something of Something. Like, Orb of Thesulah, Hand of Ortega, Gem of Amara. It always makes it sound more important and magical.”

“Nah, it’s just… scythe.”

“Very underwhelming. 0/10.”

“Who cares?” Luke asks, beaming down at the scythe. “We finally have a real chance against Caleb.”

Reggie groans. “Ugh, I’m sick of Caleb. Can’t we get a new Big Bad?”

The whole Scooby gang turns to stare at the vampire.

“I mean, I prefer no Big Bad. But, you know, variety is the spice of life.”

Flynn raises an eyebrow. “You want variety? Coming from the guy whose entire diet is blood?”

“Why you always gotta bring up the blood thing? I’m a well-rounded vampire—there are so many other things you could bring up.”

“It’s like Luke’s shirts,” Julie shrugs. “It’s just too in our faces for us to not comment.” She shoots Luke a pointed look.

He sighs. “Do you need me to change my shirt?”

“No!”

As soon as the word leaves her mouth, Julie scrunches up her face, as if that will somehow retract what she’s said and the urgency with which she’s said it.

It’s basically the greatest moment of Luke’s entire afterlife.

“Hey, Julie, do you need some water?” Reggie asks innocently.

She cuts him a glare. “No, Reggie, I do not need water.”

“Are you sure?” Alex asks. “Cause you seem really thirsty.”

Flynn, Alex, and Reggie bump fists. Exasperated, Julie turns to Luke. “Luke, could you—”

He shouldn’t, but he does: he dances his pecs at her. Her face twitches as she refuses to look down.

She turns to Willie. “As the only grown up in the room, could you go deep research mode? See if any of your contacts know anything about the potential powers the scythe has? I feel some really deep magics when I’m holding it, so I’m thinking it could be more than just a weapon.”

“Yeah, of course.” Willie starts toward the door of the Magic Box, then he swings back. “Oh, Julie. While I’m out, do you need me to get you anything else? Maybe a drink?”

She scrunches up her face again. “You know what? Maybe I’ll fight on Caleb’s side this time around, because you’re all the worst.”

Julie marches toward the back room, but Luke poofs in front of her. “Okay, we’ll stop. You wanna train?”

She opens her mouth to answer, but he’s still riding the giddy wave of having the girl he’s in love with confirming that she finds him attractive, and his pecs dance again.

Dropping him an unimpressed look, she puts her hands on her hips, casually pulling the V-neck of her shirt down a bit lower. “Is that really a game you wanna play?” she murmurs dangerously. He glues his eyes to the ceiling and shakes his head.

“No, ma’am.”

“Then let’s get training.” She swishes past him, but not without glancing back with a smirk that takes his breath away.

* * *

The only good thing that came out of the months when Julie was dead is Sunset Curve, the band Luke founded very casually with Alex and Reggie. Something about whaling on their instruments helped them to process their grief, and after Julie returned, it helped them process their feelings about that and their general rage and anxiety from living on the Hellmouth, so they’ve kept it up as a hobby.

If he’d actually thought about it, Luke might have realized that he never actually told Julie about it. It’s not something he’s keeping from her—it’s just not the kind of thing that he makes a point of telling people. The band just kinda exists, and being slated to play at the Bronze that night just kinda happens because the scheduled band drops out at the last minute and Reggie knows the manager.

So it really comes out of the blue when they try to take the stage at the Bronze only for him to be tackled by Julie. Especially because he didn’t even know she was here.

“Jules, what the hell—”

“How could you?” She stares at him with angry tears in her eyes.

His brain is working even slower than usual because, to be honest, Julie is straddling him and that’s definitely a first and also he’s checking that his guitar wasn’t injured in the assault.

“How could I… play guitar?”

“Play in a band, you absolute asshole! Without even saying goodbye!”

She shoves herself off of him, furious. He stumbles to his feet, hoping that the distance and his intact guitar will help him understand what’s going on. But no dice.

“Um… Jules, I feel like I’m missing part of this conversation.”

She stares at her, her face shifting from rage to confusion and then back to rage. “You lied.”

“… about the band?”

“About your unfinished business.”

Oh shit. He’s honestly forgotten about it. No one else has ever asked about his unfinished business, so it isn’t a lie he’s had to sustain. It’s one conversation almost four years ago, and she remembered it and he didn’t.

There’s also absolutely no way he can get out of having been caught in the lie. “Yeah.”

“Why.”

He glances at the stage. The crowd, Reggie, and Alex are all staring at him. She realizes this at the same time. “Afterwards?” she offers, jaw still tense.

“Afterwards, I promise.”

“I’ll be at Sunnyside Cemetery.”

She marches out, not staying to hear them play.

If he’s honest, he doesn’t really listen to them play that night either.

* * *

He poofs to her side to find her staring at a headstone. He glances over at it, expecting it to be her mother’s, but…

Oh.

She studies his face. “Have you never been here?”

“No.” He crouches in front of it. Just his name, birthday, death day, and a small carving of a guitar. His parents really hadn’t known what details to include, had they?

He realizes Julie is waiting for an explanation. “Always felt a bit like… getting off on my own nudes, you know?”

“Huh.” He glances up at her, confused by her tone. She shrugs. “I just would have assumed you were someone who got off on your own nudes.”

“I’m sorry if I scared you tonight. I honestly didn’t-”

“Remember? That was clear. Weird to think I’ve spent four years terrified every time you pick up a guitar and you just forgot.”

His heart sinks and he gets to his feet. “Jules, I’m so sorry.”

But that’s not what she’s focusing on. “What is your unfinished business?” He hesitates. “Luke.”

“My unfinished business is depressing, okay? I didn’t wanna make you carry that.”

“That’s not an answer.”

He sighs loudly. “My unfinished business is to save the Slayer. And that’s not gonna happen, okay? Every Slayer dies horribly, so I’m never gonna complete my unfinished business and I’m just gonna be stuck here forever.”

What he's expecting is for her to look at him with pity or pain, or to give him a hug, but what she actually does is laugh. “Luke, that can’t be it.”

“Do you think I want this!? I would give _anything_ to just—”

“No, I mean, Luke, that literally can’t be it. You _have_ saved me. You saved my life the night we met. You’ve saved my life countless times since. If that was your unfinished business, you would have crossed over a thousand times by now.”

“That doesn’t count. Those were all temporary.”

“Of course it is. It’s always temporary. No human lives forever.” Gesturing to herself, she gives that dark smile she's learned to pull off. “Living proof.”

Irritated, he shrugs her off. She’s acting like this is an argument with the Council, as if she can change reality just by refusing to accept it, and that won’t work here. “Okay, then, my unfinished business is impossible.”

“That’s not how unfinished business works. Goddamn it, how have you still never read anything about ghosts?” He wants to explain again about the nudes, but he really doesn’t think that being derailed into a discussion of nudes or getting off is going to be helpful right now. “Your unfinished business has to be something that you could have accomplished in life, but just didn’t.”

Okay, maybe he _should_ have read about ghosts. But… “There wasn’t anything else. I wanted Rose to live a long, fulfilling life with the people who loved her.”

“And that’s super sweet, but maybe your unfinished business is actually about you? Something you wanted for _yourself_?”

He’s a Watcher. Ever since his parents told him he was going to be a Watcher, that’s been his whole life. He doesn’t get to want things. He looks after the Slayer, no matter the cost, and that’s the end of the conversation.

Feeling lost (and pathetic about feeling lost, because who doesn’t know anything about what they want?), he looks desperately to Julie. Her face softens and she steps closer, puts a hand on his shoulder, and turns him gently to face his own grave.

“What would you say to him? What did you wish he could have had?”

He stares at the headstone, trying to remember seventeen-year-old Luke. The Luke who bought protection amulets, who desperately wanted to take care of a scared, pregnant Slayer, who wanted to prove to her that he could help keep her alive despite the odds. The Luke who was terrified, not just for her, but for himself, who didn’t want to die before he got to live.

“A long, fulfilling life with the people who loved him.”

“Then do that.”

“I’m dead. I literally can’t have a life.”

She steps in front of him, rolling her eyes. “Have you not been paying attention? You, me, Reggie? We redefine life. You have a life by living it. The heartbeat”—she steps towards him and puts her hand on his chest—“is optional. You want a long, fulfilling life with the people who love you? Then spend your life with me.”

It’s not exactly news that she loves him, but she hasn’t said it since she was resurrected and he feels like his lack of a heart might explode. She slips her other hand into his. He immediately links their fingers together and runs his thumb over her fingers, thrilling at the contact.

He can’t bring himself to point out that “long life” and “Slayer” aren’t compatible. It’s really not the time.

“And what if that’s not my unfinished business?”

“Then we’ll figure it out.”

He rests his forehead on hers and nuzzles their nose together. It’s like a thousand tiny electric shocks are going off in his body, his throat overflowing with tiny bubbles of happiness, the joy and anticipation leaving him almost dizzy. As he starts to lower his mouth to hers, she whispers, “Can I just point out—when I say I’ve been dying to kiss you, I literally had to. So I’d like credit for my commitment.”

“Yeah, well, I died to kiss you first.”

Before she can get another word in, he kisses her.

* * *

“But how long?” he asks.

They’re in his bed, lying almost nose-to-nose, and her bare legs are entwined with his under the sheets. He has no idea what time it is—he keeps blackout curtains in his room in case Reggie barges in (as he tends to do)—but they’ve been up for hours talking about all the things they’ve never been able to say before.

He wants to say it’s been the best night of his life, but to be honest, his life has mostly sucked so he feels like that undersells it.

“Luke, you’re a hot guy who refuses to wear real shirts, and the night we met, you appeared out of nowhere, told me I had superpowers, and helped me save my life. I’ve been in love with you since I first saw you.”

He kisses her, because he fucking can. “I really thought that you’d be less fixated on the shirts once you’d seen me without them.”

“Let’s be honest here. The shirts never left that much to the imagination. None of this”—she gestures at his bare chest—"is news. What about you?”

“Your shirts seem regular. I have no notes.” She smacks him on the shoulder. “Ow, misuse of Slayer strength.”

“I meant, how long have you been in love with me?”

“Not since the first moment I saw you, cause you were a newborn.”

She pulls a face. “Can we maybe not dwell on that? I already feel like my dad’s gonna be weird about us.”

At the thought of having _that_ conversation with Ray, he groans loudly. But as he takes in her face, he sobers. “I don’t really know. Like I said, it was inevitable.”

The smile on her face is too soft for his heart to handle. “That was about me?”

He traces her cheek with his hand. “Maybe when you figured out my Magic colors.” He kisses the middle of her forehead. “Or maybe when you ripped Travers a new asshole, because that was the raddest thing I have ever seen.” He kisses her forehead over her left eyebrow. “Or maybe when you ripped _me_ a new asshole for refusing to train you.” He kisses her left temple. “Or maybe—”

“Are you trying to kiss every part of my face?”

“Of course. Your whole face needs kisses. It’s my sacred destiny to apply the Kisses of Luke.”

She laughs and shoves his face away. “No, sorry, you swung it from super cute to super cringe.”

Embarrassed, he sticks his tongue out at her. “The Kisses of Luke might be a real thing. You don’t know, because you never do the reading.”

Using a bit of unnecessary Slayer strength, she pokes him in the chest. “It’s literally your job to do the reading. And if the Kisses of Luke are real, then you’re going to have to write about them in your Watchers’ Diaries. Are you planning to write about this?” She gestures to them in bed.

“Nah, this is definitely redacted.”

Her face glows, but she doesn’t stop teasing him. “But how will other Watchers learn about the Kisses of Luke? Think of the future generations.”

“I’m starting to regret this.” He waves a finger between them. “Maybe I’ll call Clem—”

He reaches for his phone, but she tugs on his hands, giggling. “Stop, no, I’m sorry, I’ll stop.” But she only pauses for a moment before she grins mischievously. “Because Clem doesn’t have the strength to bear the Kisses of Luke. They could kill him.”

Shaking his head, he pulls her into his arms and nuzzles her forehead. “You’re so lucky I love you.”

“Yeah, I really am.” She kisses him deeply, drawing him in closer—

Which is exactly when Reggie barges in. “The gang’s here, Willie’s got major—” He stops short when he sees them. “GUYS. IT’S HAPPENED. Also, MY EYES.”

“Reggie, get out!” Julie chucks a pillow at the door with her full strength. It slams the door shut.

Luke grins at her. “See, that’s the proper use of Slayer strength.”

* * *

“But what does that mean?” Reggie asks, glaring at the scythe as if it’s being deliberately obtuse.

The Scooby gang stands around Luke’s kitchen table, eyeing the weapon with awe.

“The scythe draws from the same pool of magical energies as the Slayer. It’s not just connected to the Slayer; it’s fueled by the same power source,” Willie explains, pacing slightly.

There’s an energy in the room, as if some part of them knows how life-changing this is, but they just haven’t put their fingers on it yet.

Luke traces his finger over the blade. “Could we use the scythe to access the source?”

“Theoretically, but you’d need a crazy powerful magic user. Luckily, I know a guy.” Willie straightens up and smirks. “It’s my husband. My husband is the guy.”

Grinning, Alex hugs Willie from behind and kisses his husband on the cheek. “It me.”

“What are you thinking?” Reggie asks. “Supercharging Julie? She taps Caleb on the head with her pinky and shatters him into a million pieces?”

Flynn makes a face. “Reggie, do you have any idea how disgusting that would be? Blood and guts everywhere.”

“Oh, yeah, ew, let’s not. I don’t like the sight of blood.” Everyone stares at him. “I keep telling you guys—I’m a well-rounded vampire!”

Julie suddenly freezes. “Luke, the Potential Slayers. How do they get activated?”

“When the previous Slayer dies, her power gets passed on to the next Potential. We don’t really know exactly how the process works because, you know, we can only study it when Slayers die.”

“I refuse to believe that the Council wouldn’t just murder a bunch of new Slayers ‘in the pursuit of knowledge,'” Flynn points out.

“Yeah, I have a feeling that-“

Julie tries to pull them back on track. “So if we tapped into the power source and released it, theoretically it would activate the Potentials?”

Holy shit.

Luke stares at his girlfriend. Her mind is a thing of beauty. “An army of Slayers,” he breathes. He steps back from the scythe to process the idea, then chuckles.

She quirks her head. “What?”

“It’s just a really white-blue thing to do.”

The room goes silent.

“Magic: The Gathering?”

It remains silent. Deeply, judgmentally silent.

“Those are the colors she tends to play in Magic?”

Flynn puts a gentle hand on Julie’s arm. “Jules, you know the Council has other Watchers, right? You’re not stuck with this one?”

Luke quirks an eyebrow at Julie, but she just rolls her eyes fondly.

Tapping his chin, Reggie looks to Alex. “Wouldn’t it be more of a blue-green move?”

“We are really not discussing that right now. How many Slayers would that be?”

Luke shrugs. “Tens of thousands. Possibly more.” 

“Is that enough for every city in the world?" Reggie asks. "How many cities are there in the world? I’m gonna Google it.” He whips out his phone.

Julie’s eyes light up in full-on planning mode. “We could have units of Slayers, send them where they’re needed, have multiple Slayers stationed on each Hellmouth. Actually beat back the forces of darkness.”

Alex prods the scythe. “And just to reiterate, this has just been buried under Sunnydale for thousands of years? Waiting for, what, a dramatic entrance?”

But Flynn asks the most important question: “Does that mean Julie could retire?”

Everyone’s gaze shoots to Luke. But it’s not up to him. He raises an eyebrow, asking her. Stunned, she half-raises her shoulder in a shrug. Too many new things to think about it.

“Maybe, if she wants. You wouldn’t be one girl in all the world anymore, with the burden of destiny. You’d get a choice.” All at once, he realizes the physical burden that her Slayer destiny has laid on her shoulders for the last four and a half years, because he can almost see it lifting. She seems lighter and more relaxed and more sure and… brighter somehow. “I mean, if we do this spell, the whole Slayer business changes. Nothing is certain anymore.”

It looks like her mind is going a mile a minute, taking everything in. She reaches out her hand and grips his, giving it a squeeze.

“What do you want to do?” he asks.

She just smiles.

“I dunno. But we’ll figure it out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for all the comments, kudos, and encouragement along the way! I thought this was going to be read by about three people, and it was so lovely to hear that so many of you enjoyed it.
> 
> I’m not ready to leave this weird little fusion world quite yet so I have at least two oneshots planned: [one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27150490) that gives Reggie’s story a bit more closure, and [one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27126020) about the times that the others realized Julie and Luke were in love (introducing the long absent Carlos!) But if you have any other prompts or missing scenes you want to read, feel free to drop them in a comment or on [tumblr](https://pearlcaddy.tumblr.com) and I’ll see if it sparks any ideas!
> 
> Episodes of _Buffy_ referenced in this chapter:  
> • “Chosen”  
> 


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